This proposal discusses considerable benefits of a recent outreach project to strengthen relationships between Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), an established CAE for over two decades, and several Community Colleges (CCs) and technical institutes across Pennsylvania. IUP has been working with several CCs for years to promote cybersecurity education and research in the western PA region. With support from a Capacity Building Project that focuses on outreach to technical and community colleges funded by the DoD and as a part of the Cyber Scholarship Program (CySP), IUP has built long-term relationships with several CCs throughout PA and provided engaging and highly rated professional development opportunities in cybersecurity to faculty and students at six institutions. The main goal of the project is to find additional ways to recruit qualified students into the cybersecurity field and DoD CySP to help protect the nation’s cyber infrastructure. This goal was achieved through increased faculty and student development (via a series of collaborative cybersecurity workshops), and a wider network/partnership with several CCs and minority institutions. Specifically, our workshops have been designed in such ways to ensure that all participants will develop the following skills, abilities, and knowledge:

1. Faculty and students are able to self-organize their work, collaborate, and be successful in assessing and resolving vulnerabilities in digital space.
2. Faculty learn new cybersecurity teaching methods that help increase knowledge retention and develop plans for continuing education and professional development.
3. Students leave the workshops with a vast set of skills, including programming specialty computers and embedded systems.
4. Faculty and students learn procedures for ensuring software integrity through hands-on activities such as hash generation and verification.
5. Faculty and students develop interest in cybersecurity and are motivated to further their study of advanced techniques in cybersecurity to protect systems from vulnerabilities.

We have offered six workshops that each consist of two full days delivered over two successive Saturdays or during a semester break. Workshops were originally delivered face-to-face, but we shifted the delivery mechanism online due to the pandemic. We delivered workshops to the following CCs and technical institutes geographically distributed across PA: Westmoreland County CC, Pennsylvania Highlands CC, Laurel Business Institute, Laurel Technical Institute, Butler County CC, and Northampton CC. Below is a list of benefits and outcomes that resulted from this outreach project:

1. We built excellent relationships with faculty and administrators at six institutions across PA.
2. We were able to provide well-received, cybersecurity professional development to about 120 faculty and students at six different institutions.
3. Our offerings continued to be engaging after the shift to online delivery, which has been shown in the participants’ high ratings of all sessions.
4. Efforts in this project have facilitated ongoing collaboration work that involves about half of PA community colleges working with IUP to enhance cybersecurity and STEM education.