Did you know that there is a huge gap of professional cybersecurity experts, with 100,000+ open positions? Frank Hall with CyberPatriot is here today to share how this program is leveraging educational games to give students a head start in pursuing a career in cybersecurity.

CyberPatriot is a cyber education program that works with people all the way from elementary school students to senior citizens. It’s goal is to help everyone learn how to protect themselves, their computers, and their information online.

The core of the program is an annual competition for middle and high school students. While competing, students get to practice actual information technology skills such as encryption, computer lab setup, and defending a network from a live attack.

Frank uses real world cyberattack data to show his students that the lessons they are learning for the game can be used to have a real impact on preventing cybersecurity breaches.

In 2020, CyberPatriot had over 7,000 teams worldwide which represents about 35,000 students participating. Frank encourages teachers to join the program and start a team at their school. If the teacher doesn’t have strong IT technical skills, it's not a problem!

IT professionals can volunteer as in person or virtual mentors to supplement the study materials provided, which is actually how Frank became involved 10 years ago.

He has found it incredibly rewarding to see many students decide to pursue cybersecurity as a career thanks to the influence of CyberPatriot, and hopes schools will jump on board to expand the program even further.

Takeaways from this episode:

1. CyberPatriot is a cyber education program that has developed an annual competition to get students interested in cybersecurity.
2. Students learn software and hardware skills that correlate to real world cybersecurity problems.
3. Teachers who don’t have technical experience can still start a team at their school and get paired with a volunteer IT professional mentor.
4. This main benefit of this program is the influence it has on students to pursue a cybersecurity career and help close the gap in the industry.

To learn more about Cyber Patriot's Cyber Defense competition, please visit:

https://www.uscyberpatriot.org/

If you'd like to learn more about cybersecurity and online identity protection, you can connect with me on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-mantilia/

To protect your company against cyber crime, you can now book me for cybersecurity training:

https://bit.ly/3CtZKzD

To keep your family protected online, learn more about our Identron Identity Theft Protection software:

http://bit.ly/Identron