It is imperative that as a champion of Ivy Tech and of my degree program in Cybersecurity that I stay connected to employers in the area and other postsecondary faculty, as well as build relationships at the secondary level. 

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I have an advisory board consisting of people who work in the industry as well as individuals who are faculty and have Information Security credentials.  One of my advisory board members, Jay Mosier, who is the Chief Technology Officer of a local company called TLS gave my first graduate and me a tour of his operating center.  Audrey Tyree, who is another board member working for the Columbus Regional Hospital keeps me posted on what’s going on with Nursing Informatics and potential grant information. I have an Ivy Tech graduate, Odell Smith, who works in the Information Security field on my board as well. Odell participated as a judge for our first ever Statewide IT Challenge on April 21, 2017. He was one of only a few external people that came to assist with the competitions. You can see a picture of some of the participating students, along with Odell, in the photo below.

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Odell is on the left in the gray shirt, and the row

in front of him consists of five of the participating

students along with Conni and Louis,

who are the other full time IT faculty at Columbus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bill Russell is the Chief Information Security Officer at Cummins, Inc, which is the largest employer in our area. He is on my advisory board and has been instrumental in breaking Cummins' approach to only hiring interns from four year universities. He had six Ivy Tech students as interns during the fall, 2016 term. The students thrived, and Cummins loves their work ethic. It is very different from those that are coming in from the universities. Cummins is excited for future growth with our IT Support and Software development programs. To the left is a sample email of a communication I recently had with Bill and the rest of my advisory board, sharing the NICE Cybersecurity Workforce Framework.

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I am a co-PI on a grant with Purdue Northwest to ensure that our cybersecurity students can transfer to Purdue Northwest at a junior level and complete the cybersecurity program there. Through this grant, Ivy Tech students accepted into the program at Purdue Northwest will not only have a full scholarship, but they will also be paid a stipend to attend. Both of our schools are Centers of Academic Excellence for Information Assurance education, which led to this idea of an excellent partnership.

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As far as secondary connections, like dual credit or dual enrollment, unfortunately, I do not have that to be able to add here. However, we are close to a dual credit situation with a Greensburg high school, and I am going to be a CyberPatriot mentor. CyberPatriot is a cybersecurity competition for high school students. I am hoping that having them on campus to do their practice and competition will build a relationship with the individual students and they might decide to come to Ivy Tech after high school and share their experiences with their parents and friends. To the left is an email message confirming my participation in the upcoming events.

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As has been demonstrated above, I take the employer/secondary/postsecondary relationships seriously, and have developed a strong network of individuals who are helping to market Information Security as a career.