Army’s Cyber Skills Shortfall Alarms MPs

Army’s Cyber Skills Shortfall Alarms MPs: The Minister of Defense (MoD) does  not understands clearly the causes or impact of the skills gap in areas such as cybersecurity and has no clear vision so that they can reduce these gaps in the coming days, a damning Commons report has concluded.

The Public Accounts Committee’s Skills shortages in the Armed Forces report revealed that as the last year the MoD has 103 “trades” where there were insufficient numbers of skilled personnel available.  This do includes around 26% shortfall in intelligence analysts.

What’s more, well the numbers of the forces has regulars describing the morale as “low” has increases from a third 2010 to 67%.

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“The Department has not developed a coherent plan to close the shortfalls and respond to new requirements, or undertaken a strategic analysis of its ability to attract and keep the skilled personnel it needs,” the report claimed.

“A challenging external environment, including the national skill shortages in areas such as engineering, means that the Department faces the strong competition from other government bodies and the private sector to recruit specialist skills. There could also be an impact on the Armed Forces should brexit further increase demand for scarce skills in the UK.”

The PAC said that the MoD is currently developing “a new long-term career structure” for those in cyber-related positions, which do involve “reviewing the entry requirements and the considering whether these posts need to be military roles.”

Well, it is not yet enough clear that how to recruit the people with specialist skills, and to think about the usage of financial incentives, flexing the entry requirements and re-desinating the roles as well as the overcoming procedural barriers to accelerate the process, it claimed.

The committees urged MoD to modernize its recruitment process, they have failed to meet the targets for the last three years.

“The Department should ensure that its skills strategy sets out a credible approach to increasing the interest in a career in the Armed Forces from among a broader base of society,” It said. “This should also include the communications plan—based on the research—to generate the interests from more diverse groups in the society and from among those who have previously served in the Armed Forces.”

In January, the head of the British army called for more cash to help out the counter cyber threat coming from Russia.

A new tech non-profit launched earlier this year to encourage the Armed Forces vets to take up the positions in the IT industry, to help reduce the skills of shortage in the private sector.