CyberPatriot: Going from energy to energy with Cisco Networking Academy

For practically 20 years, the President of the United States and the U.S. Congress have declared October to be Cybersecurity Awareness Month. The 2022 theme “See Yourself in Cyber” is especially acceptable for Cisco Networking Academy, as cybersecurity is an important part of the training and digital abilities curriculum.

As Cisco Networking Academy celebrates 25 years of impression, we’re celebrating the individuals whose lives have been impacted — 17.5 million lives in 190 international locations — as our college students develop careers which can be prepared for a digitally-transformed future.

Educating learners who join the world has been a studying journey of our personal, as we’ve grown an unmatched ecosystem of private and non-private partnerships all over the world. We do that with ardour, objective, and innovation by offering in-kind contributions in instruments, coaching, and assets to help instructing and studying, as a part of Cisco’s objective to Power an Inclusive Future for All.

In July 2022, Cisco EVP and Chief People, Policy & Purpose Officer, Fran Katsoudas, represented Cisco on the White House Cyber Workforce and Education Summit in Washington, DC. As the U.S. faces an estimated 700,000 vacancies in cyber-enabled jobs, Fran introduced that Cisco has dedicated to coaching an extra 200,000 college students within the U.S. over the following three years.

A very balanced partnership

Part of the problem of filling this cybersecurity abilities hole is attracting college students to pursue schooling and careers in cybersecurity. And the Air Force Association’s (AFA) CyberPatriot Program is a unbelievable approach of doing simply that.

The CyberPatriot Program was created to encourage college students towards careers in cybersecurity or different disciplines in science, know-how, engineering, and arithmetic.

“CyberPatriot got its start back in 2008, when a congressional study came out that said American students were doing terribly in science and mathematics,” says Frank Zaborowski, Senior Director, CyberPatriot Operations on the Air Force Association. “The Air Force Association started dealing with the junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps because we had the Air Force affiliation. And then we took it out to public schools. And [since then], we’ve grown to well over 144,000 students in our alumni.”

Fun and centered competitors

The National Youth Cyber Defense Competition is on the core of the initiative, with a collection of on-line competitions through which groups of scholars, from grades six to 12, are put within the digital place of IT professionals managing the community of a small firm. The groups are given a set of digital working methods and are tasked with discovering and fixing cybersecurity vulnerabilities whereas sustaining essential companies.

The competitors makes STEM schooling enjoyable and centered — college students can see real-world implications and real-world profession pathways by way of a enjoyable, gamified, exercise that offers them a style of what a profession in cybersecurity could appear like. The high groups within the nation win all-expenses-paid journeys to Maryland for the National Finals Competition, the place they’ll earn nationwide recognition and scholarship cash.

Cindy DeCarlo, Director, Global Government and National Security at Cisco, says “the best way to get someone interested in CyberPatriot is to bring them to the CyberPatriot National Finals Competition. The diversity across the teams, the camaraderie within the teams — it’s extraordinary. It sets the bar for what industry is looking for. They’re not only looking for technical competency, but they’re also looking for the teamwork, they’re looking for leadership skills. And this program gives students the opportunity to practice all those things.”

“We’ve watched some of the students who have started their own companies, who are super successful in the industry today. There is just example after example of how CyberPatriot and the experience of CyberPatriot sets these students up for success in the future,” says Cindy.

Enjoyable volunteering

“CyberPatriot not only works to address the growing demand for new cybersecurity professionals, but also provides a way for the Public Sector teams to give back to their customers, via mentoring assistance to the student teams. This year, we are instituting scholarships for the Cisco Networking Academy Challenge winners, in the order of US$54,000 to back up that commitment to the program’s efforts.”

But Cisco goes additional than awarding scholarships. Cisco has a CyberPatriot Academy throughout the Cisco Networking Academy, together with an teacher course, coaching modules for coaches and mentors, quizzes, and actions utilizing our highly effective community simulation instrument, Cisco Packet Tracer.

And by way of Cisco’s worker Time2Give volunteer program, greater than 70 Cisco staff have volunteered as mentor and/or coach for the competing groups, as a part of our Giving Back program. One shining instance of Time2Give is Roy Vestal, a Cisco worker with ardour and objective, who helped set up the partnership between the organizations. Roy additionally volunteers as a CyberPatriot Coach.



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