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

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

Different personnel in across organisations, sectors and countries have different levels of digital expertise. Given this, CYRUS aims to customise their training strategy to the 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 adopts 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

The project will pilot trainings from July to October 2024. The project will collect feedback from course participants and refine the course before launching it officially. In these pilot trainings, participants have the opportunity to sample a selected range of the courses for free in return for sharing  feedback. The insights garnered will help us refine and customise these trainings to better suit your team’s unique needs for the final trainings which are scheduled for 2025.

Target groups & format

The trainings are 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 are the transport and manufacturing 

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