SPARK Interns Impress

Alliance Staff and partners have been working with four students from the SPARK program in St. Louis Missouri to beta test a program that would allow more businesses, government agencies and higher education institutions to impact the career ambitions of high school students across the country. Alliance Executive Director, Gary Latham and Programs Vice President, AJ Eads have been meeting with the students twice weekly, for a period of six weeks. Each “session” is designed to open a different area of the cybersecurity industry to the students, illuminating multiple career paths that have traditionally been left in the dark.

The “semester” opened with an exploration of the NIST Framework, it’s five main disciplines and then deeper into the 23 categories. Our four students were then asked to explain how they would apply the framework in their lives.

Following discussions explored topics like Access Controls and Identity Access Management, along with examples of exploitations like Stuxnet. Penetration testing and the ethics of hacking (conversation with a real red teamer) and team building skills reinforced with Capture The Flag.

In addition to the classes that we ran for the students, we also requested several of our partners in St. Louis host the “associates” as they are called in the SPARK Program for interactive site visits. Schnuck Markets, Mastercard and Bayer all answered the call and Ryan Frillman from Equifax joined the nearby team at Schnucks for the visit.

The feedback received from the associates was nothing short of extraordinary, as they felt they were much more clearly able to link the technical skills they have been learning with real world careers and jobs.

As a cap to the Alliance portion of this program, the Advisory Council and Board of Directors invited the associates to join a bimonthly call, typically reserved for internal updates and strategy brainstorms. Alliance leaders, many of whom are global CISO’s and security leaders from around the globe shared their career stories, advice, and adjacent skills that the associates should be nurturing as they progress. One fortune500 CISO shared the importance of project management skills, teaching skills and the ability to “become a blackbox thinker”. Another long time CISO shared “where you are at, the technical skills are way more interesting and easier to get a grasp on, but don’t forget to work on skills like empathy, they’ll make just as big, if not a bigger impact on your career”.