A Report on Practical Cybersecurity Talent Capabilities—AI Empowerment Edition was released at the recently held first China Cyberspace Security Conference. The report was guided by the Cybersecurity Discipline Evaluation Group of the State Council Academic Degrees Committee and the Ministry of Education’s Cybersecurity Professional Teaching Steering Committee, with Beihang University, the University of Science and Technology of China, and Yongxin Zhicheng Technology Group serving as lead institutions.
The report found that China’s cybersecurity workforce is characterized by relatively short professional experience, concentrated geographic and industry distribution, and insufficient full-time staffing. It said cybersecurity education in the AI era needs to extend beyond curricula and knowledge systems to practical areas including computing resources, faculty, real-world cases, and hands-on training environments.
The report identifies three major areas of practical cybersecurity work in the AI era: model security, which focuses on protecting AI models, underlying data, and algorithms; AI application security, which addresses new risks arising when models and intelligent agents are integrated into business systems; and AI-enabled cybersecurity, which uses AI to improve the efficiency of vulnerability discovery, security operations, cyberattack and defense, and threat detection.
The report also emphasized that AI efficiency gains do not eliminate the need for professional judgment. Only 58.3 percent of cybersecurity professionals with more than 10 years of experience expressed satisfaction with AI-assisted vulnerability discovery, reflecting higher expectations for AI’s capabilities and reliability. Meanwhile, 68 percent of universities have established AI-related courses as independent required or elective courses. The report called for cybersecurity talent development to become more closely aligned with real-world business and operational needs, with universities, research institutions, cybersecurity companies, and key industries jointly involved in training, evaluation, and talent deployment.
Source: People’s Daily, September 20, 2026
http://finance.people.com.cn/n1/2026/0920/c1004-40802083.html