: In the digitalized world, there is a growing need not only to improve one’s cybersecurity skills and knowledge, but also to find ways to optimize the learning process, for example by motivating the learners or optimising the learning facilities, material and the learners for the process. Cyber exercises ran within cyber ranges/arenas (CR) are an efficient way for the exercise participants to improve their cybersecurity skills and knowledge level. The pedagogical way of orienteering the participant to a learning situation is to have a preliminary survey, which prepares the participant for the upcoming event, adds self-reflection, and may even provide feedback and background information for the educator about the upcoming event. The objective of the survey is to improve the quality of the exercise by knowing the interest areas, preferences and other useful information about the participants that is then be used optimise the exercise accordingly.    This study analyses the structure of one preliminary survey targeted for the cyber exercise event to be held in January 2022. The questions are justified according to existing frameworks. We have collected a set of structured questions presenting different topics related to the participants’ professional background and expectations towards the exercise. In addition to the short-term goal of analysing the survey for one cyber exercise, this work benefits the long-term goal for improving the skills of cybersecurity professionals. Our further work will validate the results of our preliminary analysis and analyse its correspondence with the survey results, and the final analysis constructed after the cyber exercise.

Cyber security MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) can enable lifelong learning and increase the cyber security competence of experts and citizens. This paper contributes with a review of existing cyber security MOOCs and MOOC quality assurance frameworks. It then presents quality criteria, which we elicited for evaluating whether cyber security MOOCs are worthy to be awarded with a quality seal. Finally, an exemplary evaluation of six selected European MOOCs is presented to exercise the quality seal awarding process. Additionally, the evaluation revealed that criteria for assuring privacy, ethics, meeting professional expectations and openness were on average not clearly met.

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The need for skillful cyber security workforce has increased dramatically during the last ten years. The contents of the degree programmmes have not been able to respond to this need adequately and the curriculum contents have not always met the industry's knowledge needs. In this paper, we describe a model for designing a degree programme in Cyber Security. We establish the guiding frameworks and requirements within the European Union for a degree programme. Given the researched background, we propose a systematic way to implement knowledge, skill and competence objectives to a degree programme by using generally accepted frameworks. The framework targets engineering education in information technology, cyber security given on university level. By having a well-established model for the degree programme, the private and public sector can flourish by having competent personnel at their use as employees.

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