The latest advancements in generative AI have created both beneficial and harmful opportunities. Novice attackers can now quickly develop multiple variations of malware to evade anti-malware detection tools and can even use advanced technology like ChatGPT to create harmful programs from scratch. Generative AI tools can easily produce human-like content, such as speech and text, to create phishing emails and social engineering attacks.

The need for cybersecurity workers is clear. With a documented current shortage of cybersecurity workers in the U.S. identified as over 300,000 openings, the need to attract, and retain more future cybersecurity workers could not be more clear. Many efforts have been created to address this need and have had clear positive results.

Professional organizations are defined as a group that furthers a particular profession, those engaged in that profession, and the public interest. As part of furthering the profession, many professional associations have created programs to perform outreach to colleges and universities. Faculty and student clubs can benefit from connecting with their local chapters of the major professional associations, such as ISACA, ISSA, and ISC2.

The landscape of cybersecurity is constantly changing. The Business and Industry Leadership Team (BILT) helps keep programs current on trends and helps schools keep programs current on what candidates will encounter in the field. This presentation highlights how Metropolitan Community College in Omaha uses the BILT.     

This presentation will share the conceptual framework for a new resource under development for the CAE Community: a competitions roadmap. The goal for the roadmap is to move beyond a traditional list and visually render everything CAE faculty and students need to know about the competitions available to enable selection of the most appropriate competition for them. This presentation will share a prototype and solicit ideas and input for the first production release.

This presentation describes how the team of Strayer University student coders won 5th place out of over 400 participating schools in the 2022 NSA Codebreaker Challenge, a hyper-authentic learning experience in which teams from across the country compete to develop successful defenses to real-time cybersecurity threats. Lessons are drawn into how students from non-traditional and underserved communities can overcome key challenges to developing the coding, engineering, strategic planning, and problem-solving skillsets needed for today’s IT workplace.

To aid organizations in finding relevant skills, organizations must first identify what skills they are really looking for. These needs must be conveyed in a format that job seekers can easily identify. A model exists to allow organizations to better identify what and why skills are needed from potential employees. Job seekers need to better categorize their skills based upon recognized components of cybersecurity not the general blanket term "cybersecurity".

RING (Regions Investing in the Next Generation) is a free online high school cybersecurity course that offers interesting and engaging content specifically for rural students, homeschool students, and students attending schools without an existing cybersecurity program. RING is structured for high school students, grades 9-12. The curriculum has been developed through the National Security Agency’s RING program grant to The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).

This session will highlight the NCAE-C Cybersecurity Credit Transfer Agreement (CTA) Task, funded as part of the NCAE-C Careers Preparation National Center, to address the challenges in meeting the future cybersecurity workforce development. An overarching goal is to establish a database of credit transfer agreements among NCAE-C designated CAE cybersecurity programs and K12 schools.

The NSF-ATE funded Cyberpreneurship project at Riverside City College is a cross-discipline effort to train cybersecurity entrepreneurs. The goal is to address the small to mid-sized businesses that make up over 40% of the breaches that occur but have no IT/Cybersecurity team or professional support. Students will gain knowledge, skills and abilities in cybersecurity and entrepreneurship. This will equip them to provide managed services, audits and other cyber/IT and automation services to those organizations.