Background Social media platforms equip brands with an opportunity to increase awareness and extend the relationship with their current and possible future consumers by providing the possibility for social interaction, monetary rewards, entertaining content, practical information and cultivating trust. Brands transition to the social medias has thus made consumers co-creators of brands offerings, as they are allowed to interact and engage with brands and its content at any time. This has put high demand on brands to create content that actually encourage participation and engagement from their consumers   Purpose The purpose of this thesis is to explain the factors that positively influence consumer engagement towards brands on social media.   Methodology This research took a quantitative approach with an explanatory purpose and a cross-sectional research design. The data was collected with the help of a self-completion questionnaire. The result was primarily derived from a multiple-regression analysis, correlation analysis and Cronbach’s Alpha reliability test.   Findings This research provide empirical evidence that monetary factors positively influence consumer engagement with brands on social media, whereas the social, hedonic, practical and trust factors failed to generate significance. However, the study revealed that the rejected factors have some effect on consumer engagement that cannot be denied by brand managers.   Originality Consumer engagement in an online environment has been an attractive topic for researchers in recent years and with the ever-increasing popularity of social media, research gaps in this setting has been identified. This research provides the first explanatory findings regarding antecedents of consumer engagement with brands on social media.

Despite multiple national, educational, and industry initiatives, women continue to be underrepresented in the cybersecurity field. Only 11% of cybersecurity professionals, globally, are female. This contributes to the growing overall shortage of workers in the field. This research addressed the significant underrepresentation of females in the cybersecurity workforce. There are many practitioner and industry studies that suggest self-efficacy, discrimination and organizational culture play important roles in the low rate of women in the cybersecurity field. A limited number of scholarly studies identify causal factors; however, there is not a general consensus or framework to explain the problem thoroughly. Moreover, there exists a significant gap in theoretical framework utilizing qualitative methods to demystify the complex factors of engaging females to pursue the cybersecurity field. This study utilized a grounded theory approach to interview twelve female cybersecurity professionals to discover their perceptions of the cybersecurity field. The participants revealed strategies that could encourage females to pursue the cybersecurity field. Data analysis included a data coding process and a constant comparative method of interview transcripts. This study identified four factors of engagement and one unexpected co-factor that are perceived to have an impact on decisions to pursue the cybersecurity field. The four factors identified were awareness, support, intrinsic and extrinsic values. The interesting find of the cybersecurity mindset profile factor that is perceived to enhance the success of career trajectory warrants additional research to discover the impacts on decision to pursue the cybersecurity field. This findings of this research gives women a voice in recommending strategies to encourage other females to pursue the cybersecurity field. The findings also aid in demystifying the complexity of the factors by organizing and categorizing them in a logical sense in order to present a theoretical model to encourage females into the field of cybersecurity. Moreover, this study provides holistic insight to academicians and practitioners in developing future cybersecurity professionals. Additionally, it adds to the body of knowledge by answering the call for that additional qualitative approaches in methodology by bringing data richness and to generate new theoretical frameworks in cybersecurity research.