Community colleges are one of the United States’ most powerful engines of opportunity: they offer affordable, flexible learning options, providing programs and certifications that both meet the talent needs of local job markets and provide pathways to stable, well-paying jobs within a community. They are also crucial avenues toward technology access and skills development in underserved communities, ensuring everyone, everywhere has the opportunity to learn.
This is why in 2021, in response to the nation’s growing shortage of cybersecurity professionals
, we turned to community colleges for help with our goal of teaching 250,000 people cybersecurity.
Today, I am pleased to report that we’ve surpassed our goal—a full year ahead of schedule. Here’s how:
Maximizing impact through strategic partnerships
Community colleges are ubiquitous—as one community college leader said in our initial listening tour, “there are three things that you can find everywhere in the United States, a bakery, a bank and a community college.” However, this benefit brings with it a challenge—how do we reach these hundreds of institutions scattered across the nation, and support them in a way that is both relevant and sustainable?
This is where strategic partnerships come in. The American Association of Community Colleges
(AACC) acts as a national advocate for over 1000 associate degree-granting institutions and their nearly 12 million students. To scale our impact and reach more communities, we worked with the AACC to launch a community of practice available to all member institutions offering cybersecurity education, wherein educators exchanged best practices, shared innovations, and drove systemic change. As Patrick Smith from Mountwest Community and Technical College in West Virginia described, “The brainshare amongst the community was fantastic. I found it invaluable to be able to share innovations with sister community colleges and find new ideas to implement to make my program and my students more marketable and employable.”
These partnerships bring more than just scale—they also allow us to focus our efforts where they’re needed most. One of the challenges identified by community college leaders was that faculty were teaching subjects they had never taught before—the landscape of cyber and tech was just evolving too rapidly. That’s why we are working with the National Cybersecurity Training & Education Center (NCyTE), which delivers cybersecurity training bootcamps for colleges across the country, to address that challenge through their Accelerating Community College Cybersecurity Excellence
(ACCCE) program. ACCCE provides faculty with deeper professional development opportunities and supports them in attaining the Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense (CAE-CD) designation.
Turtle Mountain Community College (TMCC) was one of the institutions that received this support. Founded by the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in 1972, TMCC is a leader among our nation’s tribal colleges. In June, TMCC became the first Tribal College to earn the CAE-CD designation, and now offers a Bachelor of Applied Science in Cyber Defense. Chad Davis, IT Director of TMCC, sums up the importance of this designation: “Being recognized as a Center of Academic Excellence helps us attract more students interested in pursuing careers in cybersecurity, all while promoting the importance of cybersecurity within our tribal community.”
Through this work with the AACC, NCyTE, and other strategic partners, we’ve supported more than 400 community and technical colleges across the US in creating accessible, affordable, and sustainable cybersecurity learning hubs that can help address the cybersecurity skilling needs of their communities for years to come.
Tailoring programs to local landscapes
America’s economic, cultural, and geographic diversity is reflected in the four hundred community colleges with whom we worked. Each community and community college has a unique set of challenges, and the solutions we found in, for example, Danville, Virginia, sometimes didn’t work in El Paso Texas.
Danville Community College (DCC) operates in Virginia’s “data center alley,” which provides a network of excellent computer science job opportunities. The college has a highly regarded Cyber and Network Security Associate of Applied Science Degree program, and students often get job offers before they even finish college. However, there isn’t a pipeline of high schoolers thinking about a future in cybersecurity. The college worked with Microsoft’s TechSpark team and supported the DCC’s CyberKnights Showdown hackathon,
a competition for students at the local high school. It’s an online, capture-the-flag environment, and the participants give their teams names like ChalkEaters, Epic Misfit Debris, and Hack & Quill. Winners get prizes and bragging rights, and the hackathon sponsors find future cybersecurity superstars.
El Paso and Ciudad Juárez are sister cities, with all the complexities that come with having a population spread across a border. But that transnational identity is a strength and opportunity: the El Paso Community College partnered with Microsoft TechSpark and the Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez to create Hack the Border
, a series of workshops and hackathons designed to provide cyber skilling to the community and bring students, educators, industry, and leaders from both countries together to tackle real-world problems on both sides of the border.
Bringing skilling opportunities to more students
Even as community colleges provide fantastic cybersecurity degrees and local partners provide skilling opportunities, ensuring that everyone can complete these programs remains challenging. It is not for lack of demand or talent—it’s a matter of financials.
Tens of thousands of community college students across the country are within reach of completing a tech degree, but financial hurdles force these students to pause their education or drop out of school entirely. A small investment can get these students through that “last mile.”
The Last Mile Education Fund
(LMEF) provides these students scholarships to overcome the financial barriers and graduate. We partnered with LMEF to establish the Microsoft Cybersecurity Scholarship
, which provides scholarships to community college students pursuing degrees in cybersecurity—helping pay for incidental costs that can derail an education, things like car repairs, dental work, medical bills, apartment deposits, and cell phone bills. To date, the fund has awarded students more than 5,000 scholarships
in all 50 states.
I’m especially proud of this effort and its impact on students like Avwerosuoghene Etaghene. Her $500 scholarship was “a lifeline.” It helped with things like textbooks and gas money to commute to campus. She says, “It was a small sum with an enormous impact, helping to bridge the gap between my aspirations and the practical challenges I faced.” The grant helped her complete an associate’s degree in computer science and cybersecurity coursework at Houston Community College, and she is now pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Stanford.
Skilling everyone for a more secure future
As we celebrate that we achieved our cybersecurity skills goal a year early, it’s important to recognize that this victory lap is just lap one in a greater marathon unfolding in front of us: the new AI economy. Our annual Digital Defense Report
demonstrated that AI is transforming both the threat landscape and cybersecurity defense—threats are now more sophisticated, but new opportunities are emerging. To ensure that we unlock this opportunity of AI for everyone
, we’ll continue to work with governments, community colleges, local partners, and people to adapt these opportunities and programs so everyone, everywhere can learn, especially in underserved communities.
To learn more about our cybersecurity skilling initiatives and to see how you can partner with us to build local talent pipelines and empower communities, visit our Cybersecurity Skills
website.
Together, we can create a safer, more secure digital future.
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