History

The concept for the NICE Framework began before the establishment of NICE in 2010 and grew out of the recognition that the cybersecurity workforce had not been defined and assessed. To address this challenge, the Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council took on the task in 2008 to provide a standard framework to understand the cybersecurity roles within the federal government. The first version was posted in September 2012. A subsequent U.S. government-wide review noted specific areas to be further examined and refined. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) gathered input and validated final recommendations via focus groups with subject matter experts from around the country and across industry, academia, and government resulting in a second version of the NICE Framework, version 2.0, shared publicly in 2014. The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) expanded on version 2.0 through internal engagements with service components and external engagements with the private sector. The DHS and NIST co-authors worked with OSD to refine their expansion to become the current version, published in August 2017, with a goal to emphasize private sector applicability and to reinforce the vision that the NICE Framework is a reference resource for both the public and private sectors.

Earlier Versions of the NICE Framework

The NICE Cybersecurity Workforce Framework (aka the NICE Framework), NIST Special Publication 800-181, is a national focused resource that categorizes and describes cybersecurity work.

• NICE Framework Specialty Areas of Time Spreadsheet (January 2018)
• NICE Framework 2.0 Spreadsheet (April 2014)
• NSA DHS CAE Knowledge Unit (KU Mapping to the NICE Framework 2.0)
• NICE Framework 1.0 - Interactive PDF (April 2013)
• NICE Framework 1.0 Development Process (September 2012)
• OPM Federal Cybersecurity Coding Structure 

Development Process 

Credit: NIST/NICE