"Trust Me, You Will Need It": Cybersecurity as Extracurricular Subject at Estonian Schools

Discovering new talents in IT and cybersecurity is increasingly vital in the information society. The traditional approach has been to start professional profiling when the youth reach grade 10 (age 16–17) – many young people find a topic to focus on in the secondary school and finally form a profession with the 3rd-level studies (trade school or university). Yet, this may be an outdated way, as the leaders of tomorrow will need competencies in more than one field, cyber skills being likely one of them. The initial results of the Estonian best-practice: Competition CyberCracker School round for 7–12th graders suggests that the method works in several aspects. First, the number of talented youth is quite large in comparison with population numbers - the mass screening in the first rounds allows find also those who would not enter any competitions (for various reasons). Second, while the gender gap still exists (interviews with the participants reveal that the number of girls seeing themselves as future cybersecurity specialists is still small compared to boys), the 2/2 quota does not reflect ‘equality on paper only’ - the actual enthusiasm does not differ (once the latter have actually reached the final round). Overall, the positive trend is clearly visible - just in a year (2018/2019), the number of participants went up from 1000 to 2344 and the number of participating schools from 47 to 65.