From Practitioner to Professor: An Evidence-Informed Model for Sustainable Cybersecurity Faculty Recruitment and Retention

Abstract

Higher education continues to face difficulty recruiting and retaining cybersecurity educators combining current professional credibility with the capacity and motivation for teaching. The article develops an evidence-informed faculty sustainability model through integration of findings from a qualitative phenomenological study of 17 postsecondary cybersecurity educators and a subsequent practice-oriented synthesis of cybersecurity faculty recruitment and retention. The original study identified three themes,sense of calling, early adulthood influences, and approaching occupational choice,and eight related subthemes describing practitioner movement toward teaching as a viable professional path. The later synthesis reframed the findings as an institutional design problem and proposed four candidate-evaluation domains: instructional capability, instructional readiness, professional credibility, and motivation and commitment. The present analysis extends the integration through examination of practitioner identity, career timing, institutional signals, role design, onboarding, mentoring, workload calibration, professional development, governance, and continuous improvement across a faculty lifecycle. The resulting model positions recruitment and retention as a single leadership system rather than separate administrative activities. Practical implications address academic leaders, human resource professionals, search committees, and institutions seeking durable cybersecurity faculty capacity, while a measurement framework supports evaluation of faculty sufficiency, early retention, instructional effectiveness, and institutional learning.

Index Terms

cybersecurity education; faculty recruitment; faculty retention; higher education leadership; occupational choice; practitioner faculty; social cognitive career theory; transformative learning

How to cite

Lightcap, R. (2026). “From Practitioner to Professor: An Evidence-Informed Model for Sustainable Cybersecurity Faculty Recruitment and Retention.” International Journal of Culture and Education, 3(1). DOI pending.