In a previous blog post, I promised to cover three topics related to the development of the NSA CAE community:
1. Increasing number of CAE-designated institutions.
2. Mapping to roles
3. Incorporating competency statements
I covered number one last time. This post is dedicated to 2: Mapping to roles
One of the innovations introduced over the past couple of years in the CAE community is aligning a designated program of study to work Roles. This is now a requirement for new and renewed CAE-designated programs of study.
For CAE-designation purposes, Roles should be chosen from the 52 identified in the NIST NICE framework or the 54 identified in the DOD CWF. (The fact that there are two competing frameworks may befuddle, but I think it is actually not a bad thing – because they have different strengths.)
First, what is a work role?
This is an important question. Its answer seems deceptively simple:
NIST NICE says they are “a way of describing a grouping of work for which someone is responsible or accountable”.
It is important to recognize that work roles are not job titles (though they might sound like, or could in some cases even be job titles) – which is admittedly confusing and non-intuitive. Instead, they are common groupings of tasks, knowledge, and skill statements. Under this system, a single worker can have multiple roles. The image below, taken from the NICE framework describes the relationships.
As I said before, CAE-designation requires CAE institutions to identify three Roles to which their program of study intends to align. Said another way, these are roles for which the program intends to prepare its students.
If you think about this from an employer’s perspective (especially a federal or DoD employer), this should simplify recruiting and hiring: “I look at my hiring needs, you show me what roles your program prepared you to do, and voile, we have a fit”.
I like that idea. Here are my questions and concerns:
- Isn’t “fit” much more complex than work role preparation?
- How exclusive are roles? / Are there natural role clusters?
- Does it make sense to force students into Roles (at 2-year, 4-year, and graduate levels)?
- Are students going to choose programs that match their role interests and aptitudes in the first place?
- Are employers inside and outside the federal government tracking/projecting hiring/demand information for these roles?
- How accurate are those projections?
- Can the projections be shared with the CAEs?
- How difficult is it for an academic institution to change “Roles” to meet new/projected demands?
- Do some roles have more/fewer TKS statements?
- Are some roles more challenging/difficult than others to learn/perform?
- Do some roles pay more/less than others?
- Should that pay information be available to students to help students choose institutions/programs of study?
- Might each role align better to a course than to an entire program of study?
- What qualifies instructors to teach about a certain role?
I believe that these questions can be answered. But I think it will require a significant effort from employers and students as well as educators to achieve the expected or desired value of aligning programs of study to roles.
Now, for the irony. When the CAEs were first stood up in the late 1990s, designation required alignment with the information assurance training standards for national security systems. These standards were based on several roles; namely: System Administrators, Information Systems Security Officers, System Certifiers, and Risk Analysts. These training standards appear to still be in force, though they are no longer used in the CAE designation process.
In about 2014, the CAE community turned away from Roles and towards the idea of knowledge units (KUs). This approach was much more academic than applied: what a student/graduate knew took precedence over the things a graduate was prepared to do. Naturally there is some correlation between knowledge and tasks (and remember that the NICE framework wasn’t released until 2017, and DODCWF was not released until 2023 – so alignment to the breadth of roles was not even a choice). But the irony in aligning to Roles is that everything old is new again.