Why (and How) to Do K-12 Cyber Career Awareness "Backwards"
K-12 career awareness not keeping up
Career awareness has become an established, defined activity in the K-12 school day, embedded in state learning standards across the country. This effort often works well for traditional careers, with corresponding educational pathways. For new and emerging career areas, though, the typical approach falls short. For cybersecurity, and other tech-related careers like it, traditional K-12 career awareness models need overhauling.
Workforce shortages tell a story
For evidence in support of this idea, we need to look no further than the immense disparity between the outputs of the educational system and the demands of the employment marketplace. According to Cyberseek.org, some 521,000-plus cybersecurity jobs currently need filling in the United States, while the total workforce numbers just over 940,000.
That means we need — today — to find almost half again as many cybersecurity professionals as we currently have on hand. Meanwhile, we graduate about 200,000 computer science and engineering majors per year, only a fraction of whom would even be considering cybersecurity as a career. So, through no real fault of their own, schools are not guiding anything like useful numbers of students towards a career with enormous opportunities for them and immense importance to the country.
K-12 career awareness a bad fit
In fact, career awareness activities, as typically constructed in K-12 standards, are particularly unsuited for guiding students towards a future in cybersecurity. Take, as a starting point, the career guidance framework laid out by the National Career Development Association. The framework provides detailed, sophisticated tools for career guidance, and taken as a whole, is comprehensive and well theorized. The basic logic of the framework assumes that students’ intrinsic, individual interests can be mapped to career goals and preferences through interventions like career guidance sessions, self-assessment instruments, and other career exploration activities.
Implementation models
Career awareness standards, as adopted by states, have typically followed a similar logic. Two states that have among the most extensively developed set of standards in this area are Utah and Pennsylvania. In each case, the states' standards follow much the same logic as do the NCDA guidelines.
The Utah model
In Utah, "Strand 1" of the "College and Career Awareness" standards reads as follows: "Students will assess their interests and aptitudes and explore related career options based on current Career and Technical Education Career Clusters and Pathways." Within the strand, "Standard 1" states, "Assess and apply personal interests, skills, aptitudes, and abilities to education planning and future career decisions." The sequence of things students examine, then, starts with self-assessment – their own "interests and aptitudes" – and proceeds to aligning these items with matching study and work futures. In other words, their intrinsic nature defines the boundaries of what careers are made available to them as options for their future.
Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania
The Pennsylvania career awareness standards make this point even more clearly. The overarching goal for "Career Awareness and Planning" is, "To create an informed education/career plan that supports career choices based on personal interests, abilities, and aptitudes." The first standard statement reads, "Relate careers to individual interests, abilities, and aptitudes." As in Utah, the foundation of awareness lies in identification of individual "interests, abilities, and aptitudes," which are then used as a basis for identifying a set of career options that align with (and are limited by) these attributes.
An incomplete career map
An unstated precondition of these matching operations, though, makes this process much less effective for some careers than others. To match personal attributes — "aptitudes and interests" — to appropriate careers, we must understand what attributes reliably correlate to success in these careers. For many careers, this correlation is well established. In general, careers that have been around and studied for a long time are better understood and more fully correlated to underlying personal interests and aptitudes. Newer, more recently emerged careers are not as well understood in these ways. And for this reason, they are harder to align with students' personal attributes.
Cybersecurity, it turns out, presents an especially difficult challenge of this sort. Research on the cybersecurity workforce tells us:
“[T]here is a paucity of quantitative assessment regarding the cognitive aptitudes, work roles, or team organization required by cybersecurity professionals to be successful…. Defining the knowledge, skills, attributes, and other characteristics is not as simple as defining a group of technical skills that people can be trained on; the complexity of the cyber domain makes this a unique challenge.”
The North Dakota solution
North Dakota has implemented the “ND K-20” career awareness program. It focuses on computer science, with a particular emphasis on cybersecurity. The motto of the program is, “Every Student. Every School. Cyber Educated,” and it mixes computational thinking and CS-related concepts with “soft skills” such as those put forth under “21st-century learning skills. The program aims to equip students with the skills and knowledge base needed to thrive in a tech-saturated, rapidly changing workplace, whatever particular career path they choose.
“Deeper learning” a way forward
The underlying pedagogical model closely resembles what people more broadly refer to as “deeper learning.” In this model, learning becomes a blend of content-rich materials, soft skills, and the crucial element of meta-cognition. That is, students learn how to learn, in general, but more specifically, how they learn best as individual agents of their intellectual and academic growth. Outcomes are, by definition, open-ended in this model, since each individual’s learning path is unique.
This “deeper learning” model, it turns out, essentially recommends that we adopt something like "backwards" career awareness. That is, instead of using students’ intrinsic, given interests and aptitudes as pre-existing boundaries for identifying possible career matches, we would portray high-opportunity, high-value careers as intrinsically rewarding and appealing. In this approach, useful, dynamic careers in which individual opportunity and national need overlap to the greatest extent possible would occupy center stage. And at the same time, we would encourage students to identify, explore, and develop a broad set of cognitive skills that would more generally equip them for success in a career landscape sure to change in multiple, unpredictable ways in the course of their work lives.
How it relates to career awareness in cybersecurity
A cybersecurity career awareness program along these lines would have three basic features:
It would make cybersecurity fun, engaging, and relevant to students, to persuade them it should be part of their world view.
Once students' feelings are engaged, it would activate their learning faculties, leading them to use and identify attributes generally thought to matter in cybersecurity.
It would enable them to pursue learning opportunities in an open-ended way towards their own, meta-cognitive state of understanding how to plot out a future for themselves in cybersecurity, moving towards the role or function that's right for them.
This is "backwards" career awareness, in that it starts with a career, rather than students' personal interests. And then it leads students along a path of self-discovery in which they find the intrinsic attributes they already have that can equip them for success in the field they already have conceived a desire to become part of. In other words, generating field interest comes first, then comes alignment with individual attributes, rather than the other way around.
Exactly how CyberCAP works
This “backwards” model underlies our own cybersecurity career awareness program, CyberCAP. The recently updated Career Guide serves to engage and excite kids about prospects for them in the field, even if they have never thought of themselves as particularly focused on tech careers. The Student Workbook then guides them on a learning journey from understanding cybersecurity risks they face all the way to a personalized plan for making their aptitudes and interests a basis for a career in the field. Even for educators with no background in the field, the Teacher’s Guide can make this learning possible and enjoyable in the classroom, in after school program, at home, or in any other career awareness activity.
And, finally
Please be in touch if you are interested in learning more about the program. And if you’ve seen or been part of cybersecurity career programs that work especially well, we’d love to hear about it. As always, feel free to share with interested friends or colleagues.
Eric Iversen is VP for Learning and Communications at Start Engineering. He has written and spoken widely on STEM education and related careers. You can write to him about this topic, especially when he gets stuff wrong, at eiversen@start-engineering.com.
You can also follow along on Twitter @StartEnginNow.
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