CYRUS: Enhancing employees’ cybersecurity skills for better protection against cybersecurity attacks

CYRUS was a personalised, customised, work-based training framework for enhanced CYbeRsecurity skills across indUstrial Sectors. The consortium designed and implemented cybersecurity training courses to improve the cybersecurity skills of all levels of employees and give them the means to identify and mitigate cyber threats. The project was composed of 11 partners across 9 countries, and ran from January 2023 to December 2025.

Different personnel in across organisations, sectors, and countries have different levels of digital expertise. Given this, CYRUS aimed to customise training strategies to user’s skills, know-how, and needs. Based on the different needs, training include theoretical contents, practical exercises, presentations, gaming and role-plays, case studies for working groups, on-the-job and work-based formats, etc. This encourages the trainees to exercise with co-workers and continuously learn on the job collaboratively. 

The courses are focused on:

• Cybersecurity technical skills
• Cybersecurity methodological and organisational aspects
• Practical exercises
• On-the-job simulations in a cyber-range environment for the different industrial sectors

Concept & methodology

The project adopted a 3-step approach to developing the training course:

1. Analyse cybersecurity skills, competencies, training needs, and skill gaps
2. Design and development of short-term training courses
3. Validate the short-term training courses

Target groups & format

The trainings were developed for different target groups engineers, administrative staff / non-IT specialists, managers, cybersecurity experts, IT personnel, system designers, technicians, and front-end operators. The sectors targeted through the trainings were transport and manufacturing 

The format of the trainings used a blended approach, combining synchronous and asynchronous learning and using a gamified approach to raise awareness on the topic of cybersecurity.