As the need for cybersecurity grows, the Department of Defense is expanding its training to recruit more talent in the fight against cyber attacks and hacks.
Now, the search for talent has taken the DoD to Chicago's community colleges.
On Wednesday, the City Colleges of Chicago and the DoD announced that a six month pilot cybersecurity "boot camp" will be held at Wright Junior College. The program is based on training prototyped with military personnel at Fort McNair in Washington, DC, and City Colleges will be the first and only community college system to adopt this training from the military.
The program, which the city aims to begin in 2018, will enroll 20 to 30 students, both civilians and students. Courses will cover cybersecurity in the public and private sector, and when students finish the program they'll qualify to sit for the “Offensive Security Certified Professional Certification Test," a key credential in the cybersecurity world. 80 percent of those who took the bootcamp at Fort McNair passed the exam, the city said.
Several major IT companies, including Accenture, Allstate, Aon, ComEd, Keeper Security and Microsoft will also provide students with support such as internship opportunities, mentoring and job placement, as well as advise on curriculum.
To fund the project, the city of Chicago put in $1 million from unclaimed property tax rebate fund and the Department of Defense put in $500,000.
Cybersecurity talent is sorely needed in both the public and private sector, with recent news of federal level hacks and security breaches at major corporations such as Target. In 2016 there were over 209,000 open cybersecurity positions in the US, and demand is expected to grow by 53 percent by 2018.
"Recent events on the national and global stage have demonstrated the critical need to secure our sensitive data and information technology -- in the both the public and private sectors," said Mayor Rahm Emanuel in a statement.. "That's why the City of Chicago is partnering with DoD to prepare a highly-skilled workforce by tapping talent from the Military, Veterans and local students to meet the urgent needs of the military and employers where thousands of jobs are added in this field each year."
As the demand for cybersecurity talent has grown, new cybersecurity training options have emerged, such as Evolve Security Academy, a cybersecurity bootcamp launched in 1871 last year.
