More than 1.3M people across the country work in cybersecurity, but there are more than half a million open jobs still open. From network administrators to ethical hackers, there’s a need for cybersecurity workers across industries, including less traditional ones like healthcare and manufacturing.
A new initiative between Baylor University, McLennan Community College, and the for-profit tech training provider General Assembly aims to address the cybersecurity workforce gap, starting in central Texas. General Assembly will provide its curriculum for IT basics and Python programming that prepare students to take certification exams. Baylor and McLennan will provide the instructors and hands-on training at their $3.5M Central Texas Cyber Range.
The Big Idea: It’s an unusual partnership that brings together two-year and four-year institutions and a for-profit tech training program. The collaborators say they each bring a unique strength, and the only way they’ll be able to address the workforce demand is by working together.
Jeremy McCormick, a computer science professor at McLennan and director of training at the cyber range, says the new short-course offerings from General Assembly will help students quickly get a taste of the field and earn a certification—and then they can decide if they want to stay and progress. If they do, the course will count toward an associate degree in cybersecurity at the community college. From there, graduates can enter the workforce straight away or earn a bachelor’s degree in two more years from Baylor.
“We’re stronger together than apart,” McCormick says. “Each one of our schools fills a different niche.”
Filling a Gap
The Cyber Range, housed at Baylor, opened two years ago as a partnership between the university and McLennan. Students from both institutions take classes there and gain hands-on experience. The range also hosts events for the community and employers, such as skills competitions and hacking exercises. McCormick says the new collaboration with General Assembly came about when they felt the range wasn’t being used to its full extent.
After looking at their own courses and talking with local industry leaders, Baylor and McLennan decided that the General Assembly courses on IT basics and Python would be the perfect fit. Jeremy Vickers, former associate vice president of innovation and economic development at Baylor, says the courses fill a gap in the university’s computer science bachelor’s degree program.
“A lot of computer science programs don’t actually teach coding all that much, at least pure coding,” Vickers says. “And very few of them do certificate pathways. They tend to offer a broader set of skills and knowledge, and then as people move into the market, they tend to add those certifications.”
General Assembly originally built its name as an intensive tech bootcamp that catered to recent college graduates—and over the years has broadened its training and student base. In the new partnership, students in the General Assembly courses will be prepared within 10 to 12 weeks to take the CompTIA and certified entry-level Python programmer exams and receive a voucher to take the tests, fast tracking the pathway to a certificate.
No Quick Fix: With the certifications, students can immediately go into the job market. But it’s not a quick fix to getting people good jobs. Despite a push to make hiring in the cybersecurity industry skills-first, more than half of jobs in the field require at least a bachelor’s degree and most openings are not for entry-level workers. The certificates alone likely won’t be enough for everyone to get good jobs, McCormick says.
McLennan and Baylor are trying to make it easier for people to continue their education by offering classes on nights and weekends for people who are working full-time. They also offer hybrid classes to make it easier for students who can’t always commute to campus. The General Assembly courses are meant for a broad range of students, from recent graduates who are preparing for the certification exams to older students looking to switch careers. The hope is that casting a wider net and providing clear pathways to upskill will close the workforce gap more quickly.
“There’s a big movement to not just go after traditional college students,” McCormick says. “How can we get someone who has retired to come back and enter the cyber industry? How do we get single mothers?”
The partnership will also test out a hybrid and in-person model for General Assembly’s IT basics and Python courses, which are typically offered online. The required classes at the Cyber Range not only give students more hands-on experience, but also appeal to employers, according to Nick Simmons, vice president of sales at the cybersecurity company LevelBlue and a professor at Baylor.
Many cybersecurity certificates require experience in addition to coursework. The Cyber Range allows students to get some of that experience before they even enter the workforce.
“It’s one thing to learn, and it’s another thing to go and demonstrate and put it to work,” Simmons says. “That’s something that the range brings that can help students be prepared to go into the workforce. And if you’re already in the workforce, it’s an area where you can go test and hone your skills.”
A New Way to Partner
Nonprofit and for-profit job training providers have long operated outside of traditional education. Increasingly they are partnering with higher ed institutions, including community colleges, to provide in-person components and to align more with local workforce needs.
Frieda Molina, director of economic mobility, housing, and communities at the social policy research organization MDRC, said that the model holds some promise.
“Developing new course curricula and getting it accredited and all of that takes time on the part of an educational institution,” Molina says. “This could be a way that they’re being responsive to labor market demand to prepare their students in the best possible way to be able to find employment post-graduation.”
McLennan’s two-year associate degree program in cybersecurity already included preparation for certifications like CompTIA, but it did not offer Python. Another benefit of partnering with General Assembly is expanding capacity, McCormick says.
“Cyber education right now is completely overwhelmed,” he says. “You don’t have a lot of people trained in cyber going into education. We’re lucky at McLennan Community College to have a great staff of several people fully trained in cyber, but every single one of our faculty members is overloaded with classes right now. So that was one of the big reasons we went to General Assembly and said, ‘How can we try to get a little extra bandwidth?’”
Future Plans to Expand: In time, Baylor and McLennan are hoping to add other short courses leading to certifications. General Assembly also hopes to expand this model elsewhere. Its partnership with Baylor and McLennan is the first of its kind in the United States.
Jourdan Hathaway, chief business officer at General Assembly, says they didn’t approach the initiative thinking about how to teach Python and IT basics, but rather how to create upward mobility in central Texas—and beyond.
“Many of us who are looking at skills and workforce development, we all run in the same industries,” Hathaway says. “We’re all reading the same articles, we’re intersecting at the same conferences, in the same think tank spaces. If you ask that fundamental question—‘how do we create upward mobility in this area?’—you realize pretty quickly that it takes partnership, it takes coalition, and it takes coming together of deep domain expertise in different arenas.”