亚洲AV

George Mason faculty are tackling cybersecurity鈥檚 talent pipeline problem

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If you鈥檙e a cybercriminal, the latest news on cybersecurity talent shortfalls should put a smile on your face. For example, that their teams are understaffed, and they have problems retaining qualified professionals.

But for , a 亚洲AV professor of information systems and operations management (ISOM), and , an instructor in the ISOM area, this workforce challenge is a golden career opportunity for the young people of Northern Virginia and the Washington, D.C., area.

Nirup Menon and Brian Ngac
Nirup Menon and Brian Ngac

The pair recently won a two-year award from the (NIST), an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, to create unique experiential learning opportunities and workshops designed to enhance cybersecurity education and workforce development.

Working closely with industry partners and , Menon and Ngac will recruit and help select students to work on actual cybersecurity projects. 鈥淭hey need to have taken some fundamental cyber class ahead of time,鈥 Menon clarifies. 鈥淲e want students with a commitment to the field. It allows you to get experience but it鈥檚 also competitive.鈥

Throughout the 12-week projects, students will receive mentoring both from the industry participant and from business faculty. 鈥淲e run it in an agile scrum-like manner,鈥 Ngac says. 鈥淓very week, we ask 鈥榃hat did you do?鈥 鈥榃hat are you going to do?鈥 鈥榃hat are the challenges that are impacting your work?鈥欌 If students run into trouble, faculty mentors can work with industry managers to help them get back on track.

鈥淲e鈥檙e trying to build not just the cyber workforce but the skills as well,鈥 Ngac says.

Menon and Ngac have developed a specialty in this type of hands-on learning, which they have dubbed the Professional Readiness Experiential Program (PREP). More than 100 Virginia-based undergraduates and 20 industry participants have participated in PREP, which includes projects funded by two 聽Experiential Learning grants in collaboration with Mobius and IDA.聽

鈥淧REP not only focuses on cybersecurity projects, but also works on many business process improvement projects,鈥 says Ngac. "Honors and high-performing ISOM students work on real-world projects with industry participants on identifying technical solutions to business challenges through rigorous research, modelling, analysis, quantification, risk management, implementation planning, and, at times, execution.鈥

The NIST award also incorporates workshops for students who are new to cybersecurity but interested in exploring it as a career option. Workshops will be launched in collaboration with聽聽(TWU), an HBCU whose College of Arts and Sciences is women-only. For a field such as cybersecurity, which continues to face diversity challenges, the participation of organizations such as TWU is essential.

鈥淲e want to bring in students who have not thought of cybersecurity as a field, because they think it鈥檚 all engineering, hacking and coding,鈥 Menon says. The workshops will emphasize the variety of functions that are integral to the space, such as management and auditing, in addition to engineering.聽

Students and industry participants in the current CCI Experiential Learning Projects
Students and industry participants in the current CCI Experiential Learning Projects

鈥淚t鈥檚 not just tech, there may be creativity involved in anticipating scams and threats,鈥 Ngac explains. 鈥淭hese are different things we鈥檒l be bringing up in the workshop in terms of roleplaying what cybercriminals might do, or how someone might try to socially engineer an attack.鈥

Unlike a standard grant, the NIST award is structured as a cooperative agreement in which the funding agency will collaborate in shaping and delivering programs as they evolve.

鈥淭he advantage of working with NIST is that top people work there. They are the standards body, so they have seen and surveyed a lot of industry,鈥 Menon says. He also lauds NIST鈥檚 high-level view of cybersecurity and its implications. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e not just looking at technology but also public policy, human factors, etc. It鈥檚 a holistic approach.鈥

Organizations interested in being an industry participant (whether they have cybersecurity-focused or business process improvement-focused projects) with PREP are encouraged to contact Brian Ngac.