SimSpace SkillWise provides team-based development exercises and training

SimSpace unveiled SkillWise, which provides a realistic environment to conduct individual and team cyber training exercises powered by the SimSpace Cyber Range.

Through the offering, security teams and practitioners can take advantage of advanced cybersecurity training content, detailed threat intelligence, guidance on emerging threats, create tailored learning tracks, and leverage the same assets in optional live-fire events.

“The cybersecurity skills gap isn’t closing fast enough, so technology executives need the best tools available to ensure they have the right people with the right skills. But they also need the ability to develop highly customized training programs that keep people engaged and bolster retention, attract new talent, and properly assess their skills,” says Shaun Walsh, VP of Global Marketing, SimSpace.

“SkillWise presents a robust platform that delivers deep insights into the performance of the individual and how their team works in concert with one another. These insights allow managers to identify skills gaps while sharpening their ability to keep their organization secure.” Walsh continued.

SkillWise sets the standard for team evaluations, mission rehearsals, new hire onboarding, and individual and team-level training exercises — all from one self-service platform. Through an intuitive UI, team managers can define development objectives and curate content plans from over 700 hours of graduate-level training materials to enhance the capabilities of team members.

Key features of the new SkillWise platform include:

• Single dashboard for workforce readiness
  Workforce readiness enables companies to establish a baseline of organizational team readiness. Manage and encourage individual growth to improve your entire security team’s performance. Through the Team Manager console, security managers can evaluate team member activity and progress in real-time through structured content plans and labs while also being able to build customizable training plans for each team member.
• Dynamic team training library
  SimSpace offers training options for a cybersecurity team across individual training, team exercises, and group events. The training catalog includes modules for offensive and defensive skillsets, including threat hunting, application security, penetration testing, exploit development and remediation, and defensive skills training against new and emerging threats such as CurveBall, Dirty Pipe, Log4Shell, PrintNightmare, ProxyLogon, PwnKit, Zerologon, and Follina. Team members can also earn CPE credits to recognize continuing education progress through SimSpace’s partnership with (ISC).
• Content on-demand, as you need it
  SimSpace has developed a number of ways for individuals and team managers to subscribe and assign specific on-demand content and modules to their training and development program. The content discovery carousel presents an interface that highlights new and emerging threat content as its published, popular content related to their profile and key topics (e.g., Incident Response, Red Team).
• Develop and retain existing personnel
  Learning paths empowers managers and employees to design learning tracks for specific career advancement and development goals. SkillWise provides a key capability for any organization’s workforce development and helps to improve overall retention. Circuits deliver topic-specific content and further allow an individual to enrich specific competencies for their existing roles and practical knowledge.
• Putting skills to practice
  To apply the knowledge and not just learn it, team exercises and optional Life-Fire Experiences (LFX) provide a realistic virtual venue to experience threats on the SimSpace Cyber Range Platform, just as they would appear in production environments. LFX provides impactful exercises that leverage many of the same SkillWise assets — these events can also scale to mirror the infrastructure of entire organizations and include advanced attack simulations of nation-state actors and known APT groups.
• Set new hires on the path for success
  SkillWise provides a quantitative benchmark to evaluate the skills and aptitude of individual team members. This allows hiring managers to identify skill gaps within existing teams to hire more effectively. Additionally, with new hires, managers can define future training and development paths after onboarding to ensure that staff isn’t pigeonholed into specific roles.

SkillWise is built on top of the SimSpace Cyber Range platform, which is trusted by organizations worldwide, including the US Department of Defense Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE), the Department of Homeland Security, five of the 15 largest financial institutions in North America, and several of the world’s largest retailers.