A Roadmap to Address Burnout in the Cybersecurity Profession: Outcomes from a Multifaceted Workshop

2025-02-14

AI Summary

Cybersecurity professionals face escalating occupational burnout, undermining digital defense effectiveness and exacerbating talent attrition. Method: Drawing on empirical interviews with NSA tactical cyber operators, cross-domain analogical analysis from high-stress sectors (e.g., healthcare), and a multidisciplinary expert consensus workshop, this study adopts a socio-technical systems perspective to integrate qualitative analysis, analogy-based reasoning, and policy-oriented practice. Contribution/Results: It identifies structural drivers, organizational manifestations, and systemic consequences of burnout in cybersecurity. The study introduces the first domain-specific burnout prevention framework for cybersecurity; develops an actionable, public–private collaborative intervention roadmap for talent retention; and advances an interdisciplinary research paradigm at the intersection of human factors in security and organizational health.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Analogy
• Multiagent Systems: Teamwork

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Cyber-crime defenses and forensics
• Social Networks and Social Media: Socio-technical web-based systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems

Abstract

This paper addresses the critical issue of burnout among cybersecurity professionals, a growing concern that threatens the effectiveness of digital defense systems. As the industry faces a significant attrition crisis, with nearly 46% of cybersecurity leaders contemplating departure from their roles, it is imperative to explore the causes and consequences of burnout through a socio-technical lens. These challenges were discussed by experts from academia and industry in a multi-disciplinary workshop at the 26th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction to address broad antecedents of burnout, manifestation and its consequences among cybersecurity professionals, as well as programs to mitigate impacts from burnout. Central to the analysis is an empirical study of former National Security Agency (NSA) tactical cyber operators. This paper presents key insights in the following areas based on discussions in the workshop: lessons for public and private sectors from the NSA study, a comparative review of addressing burnout in the healthcare profession. It also outlines a roadmap for future collaborative research, thereby informing interdisciplinary studies.

Problem

• Addressing cybersecurity professionals' burnout
• Exploring burnout causes and consequences
• Proposing mitigation programs for burnout

Innovation

• Multidisciplinary workshop approach
• Socio-technical lens analysis
• Empirical NSA cyber operators study