Half of infosec professionals polled by Kaspersky said any cybersecurity knowledge they picked up from their higher education is at best somewhat useful for doing their day jobs.
On the other hand, half said the know-how was at least very useful.
The Moscow-headquartered multinational revealed those figures today in the first part of a multi-stage report based on a survey of 1,012 infosec professionals across 29 countries.
The lack of teaching personnel with real-world experience in the cybersecurity might be one of the biggest reasons explaining traditional education's detachment from the industry and respondents hesitating to call their formal studies useful.
Or it might be that they took the wrong course, or didn't pay attention, but that's just our opinion.
Of the infosec professionals with two to five years' experience, just 19 percent feel their formal education was extremely useful or very useful in their day-to-day work, while three-quarters of these young professionals say the theoretical knowledge they got was not useful in helping them fulfil their responsibilities.
This trend is skewed towards mid and senior level professionals.
If you were wondering what subjects these industry professionals studied - for instance, it's no surprise that someone taking physics found that less than useful for IT security - we pondered that, too.
Kaspersky said 36 percent of those polled said the highest-level of education they got was in engineering, 21 percent said information technology, 15 percent said computer science, 13 percent said business management, 10 percent said science, and three percent said mathematics or something else.
We're told 43 percent of the polled cybersecurity professionals actually studied information security as part of their official curriculum.
Which perhaps better explains the above 50-50 split on usefulness.
As mentioned above, an overall skills gap in the IT security industry may have caused or is fueling a shortage of qualified instructors who have practical industry experience as opposed to theoretical knowledge.
Without those educators, graduates may feel the knowledge they gained is less than useful in the real world.
Breaking that down: 32 percent of North American respondents said they disagreed their tutors had real-life experience; 35 percent for Europe; and 37 percent for the Asia-Pacific region.
The regions with the smallest number of academic instructors with industry experience are in Russia and the Middle East, Turkey and Africa.
Latin America seemed to have the highest report with only 20 percent of people surveyed disagreeing that their professors had practical experience in the field.
Overall, half of the respondents rated the availability of infosec courses in higher education institutions as poor or very poor, and this number jumped to 83 percent for professionals with between two and five work experience under their belt.
This Cyber News was published on go.theregister.com. Publication date: Wed, 07 Feb 2024 21:13:03 +0000