An Examination of the Vocational and Psychological Characteristics of Cybersecurity Competition Participants

The demand for cybersecurity professionals grows each year, and so do efforts to attract students to cybersecurity. Competitions are a popular way to address the shortage of cybersecurity professionals, but are competitions actually effective at attracting talent into the cybersecurity workforce? To date there has been little empirical evidence of the effectiveness of cybersecurity competitions, but this paper presents the results of an extensive survey of cybersecurity competition participants. These results provide a profile of the demographic, psychological, cultural, and vocations characteristics of competi-tions participants and may inform efforts to develop effective competitions and tools for identifying promising cybersecurity students.