Abstract:

The essential need to protect digital records motivated this study, “Cybersecurity competencies required by business education lecturers for effective workplace digital records management". Two research questions guided the study, and two null hypotheses were tested by comparing how years of teaching experience and educational attainment influenced cybersecurity competencies of the lecturers. A descriptive survey research design was adopted. From a population of 57 business education lecturers, a census survey sampling was employed. A four-point response options questionnaire was used for data collection, and three experts validated it. The reliability of the instrument was established using Cronbach’s alpha, which yielded coefficients of 0.71 and 0.72. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer research questions and measure the spread in respondents' opinions, while one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test the null hypotheses at a 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed that foundational understanding of digital protection imperatives, cloud security architecture and implementation excellence, business impact evaluation and operational consequence analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning security applications of cybersecurity competencies, among others, were highly required and that these cybersecurity competencies are highly beneficial to business education lecturers in public and private sectors for effective workplace digital records management. Based on the findings, it was concluded that those types of cybersecurity competencies were highly required and that cybersecurity competencies are highly beneficial for effective workplace digital records management. Therefore, among other things, it was recommended that business education lecturers should make personal sacrifices from their earnings and engage in cybersecurity competencies training to enable them to acquire very high knowledge and skills to perform on the job and sustain and remain relevant in their areas of operations.