Engaging recent points of discussion within academia and practitioner research focused on access/ibility in the cybersecurity workplace, this dissertation examines the impacts of National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) cybersecurity workforce frameworks on people and communities within the field of cybersecurity. The emerging era in workforce formation provides a timely opportunity to attend to the conversation around workforce development, pipelines and pathways, and what it means to create greater access to the technical field of cybersecurity for diverse, underrepresented, and/or disabled prospective employees. These developments emerge at a time when the social justice turn in technical communication has become a major focal point in the discipline. Taking up Walton, Moore, and Jones’ foundational work, Technical Communication after the Social Justice Turn (2019) and numerous scholars writing about the need to examine possibilities for justice work within user experience (Swartz, 2019), engaging with issues of linguistic justice and translation in technical communication (Gonzales, 2024; Mendoza, Haywood, Pouncil, and Kang, 2024), arguing for reciprocity in communication (Gonzales and del Hierro, 2017; Haywood, 2019; Powell and Takayoshi, 2003), and attending to questions of ethics in digital research (Haywood, 2022), this dissertation discusses a mixed-methods research study consisting of critical constructivist grounded theory analysis of the 2023 National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education Conference, whose theme titled "Resetting Expectations: Creating Accessible Cybersecurity Career Pathways," focused broadly on reimagining cybersecurity workforce pathways. The dissertation research discusses open ended, reflexive interviews with members of the cybersecurity workforce. Research discussion is followed by recommendations regarding career pathways and workforce development. A closer look into the ways technical communication has historically discussed accessibility and inclusion in digital workspaces, combined with extending the conversation using intersectional frameworks and embodied (third-space) remote work realities post-COVID, may provide new pathways into TCP research.
Read
