
“There’s too much doom and gloom,” said Keith Clement, a criminology professor at California State University, Fresno who also serves as subcommittee chair for the California Governor’s Cybersecurity Task Force Workforce Development and Education Subcommittee. The task force is a partnership between the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services (CalOES) and the California Department of Technology (CDT), and Clement was a panelist at last week’s State of California Cybersecurity Education Summit 2019 in Sacramento.
Clement’s message at last week’s event in Sacramento is that with the proper training and guidance, today’s students — from middle school through post-graduate education — will be well-situated to fight against cyberintrusions of all kinds.
“You need to have the keys to the kingdom to the future, and that’s cybersecurity,” Clement said in an interview with Techwire after last week’s summit. “But the pathway has to be clear. It has to be seamless and transitional.”
Specifically, he said, California schools of all levels and in all geographic areas must share a basic curriculum so that all students from all backgrounds are learning the same things. The middle school tech curriculum, for instance, needs to be consistent statewide, and it must lead naturally and organically into the high school course of tech study, and then into the college-level curriculum.
Clement lamented the fact that students in wealthy areas of Silicon Valley, for instance, have more resources and encouragement to pursue cybersecurity as a career than do students in the Central Valley.
“We need a model curriculum and standards” for students statewide, he said, just as there are statewide courses of study in math, languages and other disciplines.
And that touched on a second sore point for Clement: The idea that “only math whizzes” can have a successful career in information technology.
“There are plenty of jobs for a student with a two-year degree from a community college,” said the veteran educator. “Through apprenticeships, internships, career shadowing and other programs, the motivated student can follow a clear path from school and straight into a [cybersecurity] career."
Among Clement’s fellow panelists at the cybersecurity education summit was Brenda Bridges Cruz, deputy director of CDT’s Office of Professional Development, who noted the state’s commitment to the “education pipeline” through the four academies that CDT offers: the flagship IT Leadership Academy (ITLA), the Information Security Academy (ISLA), the Digital Services Innovation Academy (DSIA) and the Project Management Leadership Academy (PMLA). Cruz said CDT is “very interested in working with the state’s high schools, community colleges and universities to develop career pipelines” in the cybersecurity field.
Thus, with representatives of state government and public education on board, the third leg of the stool is the private sector.
Darren Daniels, who was on the panel with Clement and Bridges Cruz, is a solutions sales specialist in cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure for Microsoft. The Dallas-based executive cited his own experience as evidence that one needn’t be a math geek or a technology whiz in order to succeed in the IT industry. His background included sales and banking before he moved to the solutions niche for Microsoft.
“There are many ways to get into the cybersecurity side,” he noted. He added that giants like Microsoft, as well as smaller firms, see the wisdom in casting a wide net when recruiting tomorrow’s cyberwarriors.
“We recruit at not only engineering schools and business schools, but even schools of communication,” Daniels said. Cybersecurity professionals, he said, can come from a wide variety of educational backgrounds, because so much needs to be done in the fight for good cyberhygiene.
Daniels also urges parents to support their kids’ interest in technology. Cybersecurity camps are every bit as legitimate as football or soccer camps are for kids, he said.
The common theme among Clement, Bridges Cruz and Daniels is that cybersecurity is a nascent discipline — one that demands continual education and a financial commitment as well as the involvement of academia, government and business.
“We all need to do a better job of developing a roadmap,” Clement said. “We need a clear, concise laying-out of all the requirements: You take these classes, you get this degree, you get these certifications. You have the knowledge, the skills and the abilities — the KSA. And we need to give that roadmap to interested seventh- and eighth-graders.”
Clement remains optimistic, citing the rising attention being paid to cybersecurity at all levels in recent years. Though the battle of white hats versus black hats isn’t over, the dynamic is shifting for the better, he said.
“We have reached the tipping point.”