CyberBridge: Bridging the Gap Between Cybersecurity Education and Industry

2026-08-05

AI Summary

This study addresses the misalignment between cybersecurity education and rapidly evolving industry competency demands. To bridge this gap, the authors propose CyberBridge, a framework that structures job postings into Knowledge, Skills, and Tasks (KST) statements, leverages Sentence-BERT for semantic embedding, and matches them to the most relevant occupational role profiles. The approach supports three key applications: career recommendation, labor market analysis, and curriculum planning. Crucially, it incorporates an explainability mechanism that traces matching outcomes back to specific competencies, thereby avoiding opaque, black-box decisions. Experimental results demonstrate that CyberBridge effectively achieves semantic alignment between job requirements and educational content, offering institutions an evidence-based tool for career guidance and curriculum optimization.

Abstract

This full research paper presents CyberBridge, a framework that automatically maps cybersecurity job descrip- tions to professional role profiles. As the cybersecurity landscape evolves rapidly, it is difficult for academic programs to align curricula with the competencies expected in practice. CyberBridge addresses this gap by decomposing a given vacancy description into its constituent Knowledge, Skill, and Task (KST) statements, embedding them using a sentence- BERT model, and matching them to the most semantically similar workforce profiles. A key contribution of our approach is its interpretability. Rather than functioning as a black box, CyberBridge enables users to trace recommendations back to the specific competencies driving each match, providing a human- readable justification for the resulting mappings. CyberBridge supports three primary use cases; (1) job recom- mendation, providing students with vacancies and closely match- ing professional roles based on their completed curriculum, (2) market analysis, enabling educators and curriculum developers to analyze which roles are currently in demand, and (3) curriculum planning, assessing which course program best prepares students for in-demand cybersecurity roles. As such, CyberBridge can be used by educational institutions as a practical tool for career guidance and evidence-based curriculum development in cybersecurity education.

Problem

• cybersecurity education
• industry alignment
• curriculum gap
• workforce competencies
• job market demands

Innovation

• CyberBridge
• sentence-BERT
• Knowledge-Skill-Task (KST)
• interpretable matching
• cybersecurity education