This Lightning Talk will discuss how the Information Technology department at Johnson County Community College (JCCC) developed and maintains a K-12 pathway with a large local district, Blue Valley Schools. Now in its second year, the pathway provides students the opportunity to complete the JCCC Cybersecurity Certificate program tuition-free alongside their high school education. Successful students will receive both their diploma and the Cybersecurity Certificate upon graduation from high school.

The proposed tool will provide users with a platform to access a side-by-side comparison of classroom assessment and job posting requirements. Using techniques and methodologies from NLP, machine learning, data analysis, and data mining, the employed algorithm analyzes job postings and classroom assessments, extracts and classifies skill units within, then compares sets of skills from different input volumes. This effectively provides a predicted alignment between academic and career sources, both federal and industrial.

Surveys indicate a vast majority of employers require prior experience in their cybersecurity hiring efforts. This presents a majority of our current learner community with a quandary as they attempt to enter the workforce. Solid knowledge development (via degrees and certifications) is not enough. Simulation-based skill development (via ranges and CTF events) is not a replacement for the real-world experience needed by our employer partners.

The purpose of this session is to share best practices for educators to utilize cyber competitions with their students to build technical skills and demonstrate job-readiness to employers. While demand for cybersecurity talent is only increasing, students may still encounter difficulty in obtaining entry-level jobs. Many cybersecurity roles require multiple years of experience, which has led to employers being inundated with candidates for true entry-level jobs.

Playable Case Studies (PCSs) are interactive simulations that allow students to play through an authentic case study (i.e., scenario) as a member of a professional team. They include (a) an immersive, simulated online environment, and (b) accompanying in-class activities and discussions facilitated by a teacher to provide educational scaffolding and metacognition. PCSs are designed to be authentic and feel real by incorporating the "This is Not a Game" (TINAG) ethos from Alternate Reality Games.

This session will discuss a large-scale, multi-million-dollar project that is funded by the DoD-NDEP, one of only five national cooperative agreements funded in September 2022. This project focuses on the establishment of a vibrant, collaborative consortium of six community colleges (CCs), led by a four-year institution, all working together to enhance STEM education across Pennsylvania with special emphasis on cybersecurity.

Corporate Collaboration in Curriculum Design and Development. Background: The Cybersecurity Highschool Innovations collaboration with Blue Origin started with a tour for 40 high school teachers and academic faculty. This collaboration resulted in the development of an award-winning industry designed curriculum. In this 20-minute workshop, every participant completes a customized form to develop an outreach strategy with business(es) in their area to support employer outreach/workforce development activities.

Cybersecurity competency is essential for securing jobs in federal agencies and industries. To ensure students are prepared for the workforce, universities should emphasize work skill readiness. This research proposes using large language models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT to extract skills from course materials and job postings. The extracted skills can then be cross-referenced with grades received to select the perfect candidate for a given task. Compared to other LLMs, Chat-GPT meets several important requirements such as speed, low cost, frequent updates, and robust APIs.

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.