From CrowdStrike to Competence: Ensuring Your Digital Teams are Prepared For Anything

Today’s massive CrowdStrike outage is a stark reminder that our cyber defenses are only as strong as the people and their skills behind them. While I’m not making assumptions about the cause, our experience at SkillsTX shows that human skill proficiency and competence play a significant role in many breaches, attacks, and outages.

It’s time to confront a hard truth: relying on CVs and training certificates as competence validation in IT and cybersecurity audits is dangerously outdated.

If we want to address the problem head-on, it should be mandatory that organizations maintain an auditable skills inventory using globally accepted common terminology.

SFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age) from the non-profit SFIA Foundation is the perfect tool to support this. SFIA is already a countrywide standard in Australia and New Zealand and is available in a plethora of languages.

SFIA’s approach goes beyond surface-level qualifications, mapping the real skills and competencies an individual or an AI bot has to the roles that need them most. This isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s necessary in today’s threat landscape.

Companies must ensure that the right people with the right skills are in the right positions, ready to tackle threats head-on.

IT auditors have focused on technology and broken processes for too long without holding their clients accountable for their competence in using that technology. It’s not enough to have state-of-the-art systems if the team behind them lacks the necessary skills. A dynamic understanding of our workforce’s capabilities is essential.

In an era where cyber threats can cripple industries overnight, using SFIA to conduct a thorough skills audit isn’t just proactive—it’s essential.

Anything less is a risk we can’t afford!

Are you ready to start the journey towards a more secure and competent digital workforce? Contact me and SkillsTX to explore our Talent eXperience Skills Intelligence platform. For over 10 years, we’ve been helping organizations transition to skills-based digital talent strategies and adopt a common language for defining and assessing digital skills, leveraging SFIA best practices.

And now, with the SFIA 9 launching later this year, there’s no better time to ensure your team is equipped to handle the ever-evolving cyber threats.

Don’t wait until the next attack—let’s secure your future today.

The Time To Start Building is NOW!

Remember, the digital age waits for no one. Take the first step towards a future-proof workforce today.

Additional Resources:

• Request access to our on-demand demo showcase to see how SkillsTX Talent eXperience Skills Intelligence makes the SFIA Framework come to life.
• Ask yourself, “How well does my organization do Digital Skills Management?” | Take our 15-minute Digital Skills Management Maturity Assessment to find out. (40+ pages of tailored strategies for transitioning to a skills-based talent strategy)
• Download the FREE SFIA Cheat Sheet
• Create your own SFIA-aligned skills inventory by taking a FREE SFIA Assessment and compare your skills against more than 600 job descriptions and roles.
• Maximize your Microsoft Enterprise Services Agreement (ESA) with SkillsTX Talent eXperience, contributing to your Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitments (MACC).

#PassionForPotential #SkillsIntelligence #CyberSecurity #CrowdStrike #SkillsAudit #DigitalSkills #ITAudit #SFIA #CyberDefense #SkillsBasedHiring #TechTalent #FutureOfWork #DigitalRisk #CyberAudit #SkillsInventory