Winning the European Cyber Security Challenge 2022: What did We Learn?

The European Cyber Security Challenge is organised every year by the The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) with the aim of making more young people interested in cyber security and encourage young people to pursue an education and career within the field, thus helping to mitigate the shortage of cyber security skills. Denmark has participated in the competition since 2017, but especially since 2021 invested significantly in the national competition, leading to the creation of a significant youth community. In 2022, the Danish team won the European Cyber Security Challenge among 28 European countries and 5 guest countries. In this paper we describe the efforts behind the scenes, and the work done from the beginning with public and beginnerfriendly virtual training sessions all the way until the selection and training of the final national team of 10 talents. We discuss the learning points and take-away messages, which we believe can be valuable for everyone working with talent development and recruitment within technology and engineering. The first part of the paper describes how the Danish Cyber Security championships were organised throughout winter and spring of 2022, and how lot of effort was invested in attracting new young people to the field through a series of online training sessions. The competition itself - in 3 stages - was based on solving practical challenges in an easy-to-access gamified environment, where we encouraged the students to learn from each other after each part of the competition. The second part of the paper discusses the training of the national team in more detail, with particular focus on soft skills and team building. In conclusion, our experiences demonstrate how it is possible to attract more young people to cyber security through awareness, active learning, gamification, and community building. Finally, we discuss some of the challenges we still must address - including diversity.