Looking for tech talent? Broaden your search, experts say

To ease the growing IT skills gap, employers are starting to search for talent outside traditional computer science departments.

Louisiana, for example, is partnering with tech companies to open so-called security operations centers at the more than 30 colleges and universities in the state. The trailblazing program is notable not only because it’s student-run, but also because participating students don’t need to be computer science or cybersecurity majors. Anyone is eligible.

Dignitaries, including then-Gov. John Bel Edwards, joined together last October to cut a purple ribbon on the latest security operations center, or SOC, on Louisiana State University’s Baton Rouge campus.

There are already several centers throughout the state’s higher education system, including LSU’s Shreveport campus, Louisiana Tech in Ruston and virtual SOCs at participating schools through a state-owned, high-speed network—the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative.

The effort is a bid to keep LSU at the forefront of cybersecurity education, and is part of a broader push to prepare the workforce of tomorrow to deal with issues like cyber threats and the growth of artificial intelligence.

Craig Woolley, LSU’s chief information officer, said 18 of Louisiana’s 38 higher education institutions are currently participating in the program, which he described as a kind of “Neighborhood Watch” where schools work together to recognize and mitigate any threat. “By being in this neighborhood, you’re protected,” Woolley said at a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services last week in Austin, Texas.

In addition to cyber protections, the SOC model also represents a major training opportunity for Louisiana students. 

Applicants receive a critical thinking assessment when they apply. “We believe that if you can critically think, you can be trained to be a good cybersecurity analyst,” Woolley said.

Those who are ultimately employed are onboarded for six weeks, which includes shadowing employees from the management and incident response firm TekStream, which partners with the state to run the centers. TekStream employees then observe students in return. (The difference between SOCs and cyber ranges is that students run the centers, responding to cyber incidents and mitigating them, in partnership with full-time staff from technology companies.)

It’s a notable effort to overcome significant skills gaps in the workforce right now. But Bryan Daniel, chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission, a government agency that provides workforce development services to employers and job seekers in the state, cautioned that employers will likely “always [be] in some kind of skills gap,” given the quick advancement of new technologies and the education sector’s struggles to keep up.

That can be a “short-term skills gap,” Daniel said, if educational institutions at all levels are able and willing to adapt their curricula as technologies evolve. That can also include practical training—like at LSU’s SOCs—as well as apprenticeships, internships and help with job placements.

“The faster we can build the partnerships,” Daniel said, “the faster we can start teaching students in an organized way the skills they're going to need.”

Changing curricula can be tough, however. Valeria Singer, global education lead at AWS, said in an interview at the conference that states need to build a “coalition of the willing” across industry, government and academia. AWS itself rolled out such an initiative last week as it announced that Texas joined its Skills to Jobs Tech Alliance, which looks to modernize tech curricula, help connect students with jobs and build a state’s tech workforce.

But it also takes individuals to be willing. Singer name-checked Michael Lawrence, a professor at Queensborough Community College in Queens, New York, as an individual who is “willing to tear apart” two of his syllabuses to make them more relevant to the skills needed today

“When you have a pedagogy, it is very, very difficult to change it,” she said.

Those partnerships also extend to financial backing. The Louisiana Legislature appropriated $7.5 million each year to fund the various SOCs, which Woolley said would be enough to bankroll operations at all 38 higher education institutions in the state. He said the inclusion of students as security analysts was a “good story” to sell appropriators on sustained funding.

Getting potential employees and students more comfortable with AI and other emerging technologies is crucial. Daniel said one way to do that would be to show how it already impacts their lives and they already use it. That creates a “tremendous comfort level to build off,” he said.

“The more we can teach students how to bridge that skills gap, the more successful I think they're going to be in whatever it is they're trying to do,” Daniel said. “They're taking some tool that they've been given, AI or a screwdriver, or whatever tool they've been given. They're trying to adapt that to the job they've been asked to do.”