Self-Efficacy in Cybersecurity Tasks and Its Relationship with Cybersecurity Competition and Work-Related Outcomes

Research on cybersecurity competitions is still in its nascent state, and many questions remain unanswered, including how effective these competitions actually are at influencing career decisions and attracting a diverse participant base. The present research aims to address these questions through surveying a sample of ex-cybersecurity competition participants from New York University’s Cyber-Security Awareness Week (CSAW). 195 survey respondents reported on their self-esteem, general self-efficacy, and perceived efficacy in cyber-security-related tasks, along with important competi-tion- and career-related variables such as reasons for participating, competition performance, appeal and ef-fectiveness of competitions, job satisfaction, and per-ceived organizational fit. Correlational analyses showed that confidence in cybersecurity-related tasks was posi-tively related to interest in cybersecurity, performance within the competition, job satisfaction within a cyber-security job, and perceived organizational fit within cybersecurity organizations. Specific self-efficacy was better at predicting competition performance than gen-eral self-efficacy or self-esteem, but was unrelated to participants’ positive image of competitions and wheth-er or not the cybersecurity competitions influenced their career decisions. Instead, general self-efficacy was a better predictor of positive competition experience even more-so than performance within the competition. Overall, the results show that participants with self-confidence in their cybersecurity-relevant skills are more likely to do well in the competition and be satis-fied when entering a cybersecurity career, but any par-ticipant with high general self-efficacy will likely still have a positive experience when participating in com-petitions.