The European Standards Organizations (ESOs), CEN, CENELEC and ETSI, joined forces with ENISA, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, to organize their 6th annual conference. The virtual conference focused on ‘European Standardization in support of the EU cybersecurity legislation’. The event opened with the European Standards Organizations, ENISA and the European Commission giving an overview of the EU cybersecurity standardization landscape. 

The purpose of the conference was twofold. First of all, the event presented current developments in the area of cybersecurity standardization. It also fostered a dialogue among policy makers, industry, research, consumer associations, standardization, and certification organizations, including all of those involved in the development of the ICT certification framework in Europe.

The EU Agency for Cybersecurity seizes the opportunity of the standardization conference to issue two new reports on standardization in support of cybersecurity policy. The first is overview of existing standards in relation to risk management describing methodologies & tools used to meet standards’ requirements. The second report focuses on 5G cybersecurity and analyzes standards contributing to the mitigation of technical and organizational risks in the 5G ecosystem. Both reports identify standardization gaps, and provide recommendations to enhance standards coverage in these areas, based on the needs of stakeholders.

To aid in the development of a European Professional ICT workforce, it is important to provide education and training fit to meet the requirements of the ICT professional community. This requires enhanced approaches to address the education of new and existing ICT practitioners and the need for continuous professional development.

Technical Specification CEN/TS 17699 ‘Guidelines for developing ICT Professional Curricula as scoped by EN 16234-1 (e-CF)’ is designed to address ICT professionalism through education. It guides curriculum and learning programme developers through the process of forming ICT practitioner courses and programmes, along a pathway to support the development of a competent, professional European ICT workforce.

This Technical Specification provides guidance on the design/redesign, development and maintenance of a curriculum or learning programme to achieve alignment or compliance with EN 16234-1:2019  ‘e-Competence Framework (e-CF)’. The TS provides a methodology deploying the application of educational profiles as a step-by-step approach for verifying the alignment of programme content with the competences articulated in EN 16234-1 (e-CF).

ICT standardization plays an important role for interoperability and innovation and its practice remains a topic that is not easily accessible. To try to remedy this situation and prepare the next generation of standards professionals, ETSI has developed comprehensive teaching materials on education about ICT standardization. Written by a team of professors, researchers, and standards professionals, the first edition of the textbook was published in 2018 with the support of the European Commission and the EFTA Secretariat. We are now launching a fully revised and enriched edition of these teaching materials. These are targeted at third-level education, primarily for students of engineering or scientific subjects. The book and the slide set are structured in a modular form so that components can be used in business or law courses, or the whole can be used as a course on standardization in engineering degrees.

Due to the rapid technological advances in ICT, ICT standardization seems to become increasingly restricted to the expert, while remaining mysterious to the non-expert. Thus, the textbook is an attempt to remove the accessibility barriers related to the understanding of ICT standardization. The 1st Edition and the associated slides have already been used by many universities and students throughout Europe. The textbook and a comprehensive set of slides are available from the ETSI website free of charge at https://www.etsi.org/media-library/education