Alliance and Partners Collab on Cyber Workshop at Community College

St. Louis region information security professionals showed up for local high school students at a cybersecurity career awareness workshop hosted by St. Louis Community College’s Florissant Valley Campus. Multiple education partners including GHECC, The Global Center for Cybersecurity, St. Louis Community College and others collaborated to bring the program together.

Over 50 students were given a chance to learn about cybersecurity careers, including different types of jobs, the scenarios cyber professionals encounter in their daily lives, and how we think about protecting companies, governments and our most private data. Jenn Deberge, Director of Communications, Cybersecurity at Mastercard and member of the Alliance Board of Directors volunteered to co-moderate and shared her personal journey from a parks and recreation degree in college, to a rewarding career in cyber. She also shared her passion for being a trail-blazer, and joining Women in Cybersecurity, to support more women entering the career field.

Multiple information security professionals from around the area, including consultants, CISOs, Engineers and analysts participated and shared their career journey’s. St. Louis community college also supported with department heads from the IT and Cybersecurity Departments.

Converge Tour workshops are broken into three components; a discussion with the students around the basic principles of cybersecurity, an online game of Capture the Flag, testing their teamwork, analytical thinking skills and creativity in problem solving, along with a panel of real cyber defender, fielding questions from the students.

The Alliance would like to thank all of our partners on this event, and to our annual sponsors, Cisco Secure, Mastercard, Microsoft and Dell for supporting cybersecurity career awareness and education.