UK still not training enough cyber-spooks - will take 20 years to fill gap
The Government’s ambitious attempt to upgrade the UK’s cyber-security capabilities will struggle as long as the country fails to turn out enough graduates with the right skills, a National Audit Office (NAO) report has hinted.
True to its title, the NAO’s UK cyber security review: Landscape review is more of a summary of recent history around government and cyber-security initiatives than an acid critique, but the pointers buried within its pages are still hard to miss.
Despite government efforts to rectify the skills gap since 2010, experts interviewed by the NAO lined up to tell it that science and technology subjects remained relatively unpopular at school level which resulted in a weak take-up in universities. Those graduates who did exist would often end up in the private sector thanks to better career prospects and pay, the NAO found, leaving what experts believed will be a 20 year slog to make up the skills gap at all levels of education.
