The Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) set of standards is developed by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to ensure the protection of assets used to operate North America’s Bulk Electric Systems (BES). Any entity that owns or operates any type of BES in the United States and Canada must be compliant with the requirements of the NERC-CIP Standards. This talk provides an overview of the NERC-CIP Standards to describe its relevance to the protection of one of our critical infrastructures: electric utility entities, to establish its harmonizing relation with the NIST Cyber Security Framework (NIST CSF), and to disseminate our workforce development program in this area of national need.