New industry, new learning methods: Cybersecurity offers a potentially lucrative path for students via new initiatives in middle and high school
I am standing at the back of the ballroom of the Crown Plaza Hotel watching about 90 school kids take their seats. Across the way at the Fredericton Convention Centre the stage is lit for the start of the CyberSmart Conference. There’s keynote speakers, a hall of pop-up banners heralding cool tech and a spread of mid-morning granola bar snacks waiting for me.
It’s all very tempting but that’s not what I’m looking for today. I’ve come looking for evidence of change.
It’s something I’ve been observing and writing about for close to two decades and I’ve learned deep substantive change does not announce its presence. It grows slowly like tendrils of ivy in the back garden, shooting up from seeds planted in an earlier season.
“Take a look at this room,” says former principal turned education consultant Bill Kierstead, sweeping his arm towards the stage. “This is the ‘how’, right here, these kids. They are the how.”
Kierstead would know because he’s one of the people responsible for putting this Youth CyberSmart event together. There are middle and high school students here from across New Brunswick, from the Anglophone and Francophone sectors and from Rothesay Netherwood School, a private grade 5–12 school. They’re here to compete in New Brunswick’s CyberDefence Championship and to learn how they might chart a learning and career path in the field of cybersecurity.
While the adults talk big issues across the street, the kids are taking small but notable steps towards gaining proficiency in this new field.
Cybersecurity is one of those topics most adults don’t understand, including I suspect most of these kids’ parents. It falls into that large category euphemistically labelled ‘emerging economic sector’. It’s a rather bland phrase to describe the hodge podge of new ways of working, living and thinking brought about by transformative technologies such as the Internet, wireless, sensors and global positioning systems (GPS).
These new technologies are doing more than simply changing the way we work: they’re changing us in very fundamental ways.
We are morphing into a knowledge driven society that will be dominated by the mobility of people and information. This is quite different than the world most parents and grandparents know.
Those of us born and raised in the last century understand hierarchical power structures. We understand top-down management, command-and-control styles of leadership and business models predicated on restricted access to the means of production and distribution.
Many of us still live and work in that world. Our children don’t.
They were born holding an all-access pass to the sum total of the world’s information, both good and bad. It’s stuffed in their back pockets via their mobile devices that connect them (and the rest of us) to anything we might want, need or envision. To successfully navigate through this world students will need to learn how to mix, merge and critically assess all this information to create new approaches to solve problems and develop new processes, products and services.
How the heck are we going to do that?
The people gathered in the Crown Plaza ballroom may offer some clues. People like 18-year-old Zealand resident Dakota Staples. In 2018 he spent his final term at Nackawic High School working with Fredericton-based Bulletproof Solutions as part of his high school co-op credit.
Staples was part of the first wave of the Mentorship Virtual Co-op Program, a new initiative created by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (EECD) to match students looking to learn more about specific careers with subject matter experts.
Supported by co-op teachers in local high schools, students connect via video conference once per week with mentors to learn on-the-job skills and discuss their field of choice. The rest of the week they work on projects assigned to them by their mentor and overseen by their co-op teacher.
It’s virtual so students anywhere in New Brunswick can connect with mentors, which eliminates disparities in access between urban and rural students.
“There’s not a lot of course selection [at Nackawic High School] so I figured a co-op would be a good way to get some skills,” says Staples who has always loved working with technology, following the familiar path via gaming as a younger kid into coding and then more sophisticated tech learning. “My co-op teacher found out about this opportunity to work in cyber and suggested I try it.”
At the end of his co-op Bulletproof Solutions hired Staples full-time for the summer and he’ll return again this summer after completing his first year in computer science at UNB.
These are the types of stories Jamie Rees likes to hear. His business card identifies him as NB Power’s Chief Information Security Officer but he’s a lot more than that.
He’s one of the people who planted the cybersecurity seed a few seasons back that led to all these kids being in the Crown Plaza hotel talking and thinking about cybersecurity.
During a morning Q&A session, Rees told students they could earn between $65,000 and $75,000 annually, straight out of school. That jumps to about $80,000 once you earn a four-year computer science degree or gain three years of workplace experience.
“What’s that in hourly wages?” asked one student sitting a few tables over from Rees. After a quick calculation on a mobile phone, it worked out to about $31 to $38/hour. A few eyes widened and a few more heads turned in Rees’ direction with that piece of news.
Rees loves these moments. Back in 2017 he heard EECD was holding a professional development day for technology teachers at Crandall University and he asked and was granted the opportunity to speak to them about cybersecurity, what it was and what it could mean for students in New Brunswick.
“It’s the job of the cybersecurity team to find the safest and most secure way to achieve the goals of the company,” says Rees who has worked in banking, telecommunications and now oversees the cybersecurity for NB Power’s electrical system. “We’re like the Avengers, maybe better than the Avengers because none of us have actual superpowers but we show up anyway and we fight the good fight. Our job is to make the world a tiny bit safer.”
Over the last decade New Brunswick businesses have been quietly building cybersecurity expertise, centred in and around Fredericton. The UNB campus is home to the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity, led by Ali Ghorbani the Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity. Ignite Fredericton is spearheading the $37-million Cyber Park now under construction in Fredericton’s Knowledge Park, which will house cybersecurity companies, researchers and start ups.
IBM Security is here too with roots that stretch back almost two decades via Q1 Labs, one of New Brunswick’s first ICT start-ups and one of its most successful. It was acquired in 2011 for around $600 million by IBM, which used it to build out its global $2 billion (U.S.) security division. At the same time New Brunswick’s ICT sector leveraged the arrival of IBM to develop local cyber security expertise.
Today New Brunswick has a small, growing cybersecurity sector that includes Mariner Partners, CGI, Bulletproof Solutions, Kognitiv Spark, Beauceron Security and Blue Spurs, which earlier this month was acquired by Deloitte.
In January 2019 the small sector got a boost. Sandy Bird and Brendan Hannigan, Q1 Lab’s co-founder and CEO respectively, launched Sonrai Security with $18.5 million (U.S.) in Series A funding and offices in New York, Texas and Fredericton. Following the Q1 acquisition Bird had been IBM Security’s chief technology officer and Hannigan its general manager.
With all this entrepreneurial activity the next crucial step is to build out a labour force. Doing that will require a societal shift in how we — parents, teachers, administrators, guidance counsellors and post-secondary instructors — think about work. Specifically, companies are going to need people who are adept at adaptation and who can critically assess, manage and integrate new information to design and implement new products, processes and services.
Teaching children and teens how to do this will require a significant shift in teaching methods, curriculum delivery, resources, pedagogy and infrastructure.
In answer to that need EECD and Opportunities New Brunswick (ONB) signed a memorandum of understanding in May 2017 to collaborate on cybersecurity education and digital literacy initiatives. This included the introduction of the CyberTitan cybersecurity competition in New Brunswick schools, the development of co-op programs such as the virtual co-op Dakota Staples took part in, and the development of Centres of Excellence in Cybersecurity and Digital Literacy Schools, the latter intended to build capacity in key locations and for those teachers and administrators to mentor others in the system.
Industry partners play an important role, working with educators to help fuse teaching best practices with cybersecurity expertise. In practical terms, people such as NB Power’s Rees have been happy to visit schools and work with teachers and administrators to figure out how to introduce students to this new field.
For his part, Rees feels he’s repaying a public education system that helped set him down this path. Growing up in Saint John’s North End, Rees has a common ‘great teacher’ story. For him it was his chemistry teacher who happened to have an interest in personal computers and started a computing club at school. “He made sure we had Commodore magazine and Byte magazine and different things to feed the passion. It got me hanging out with different people,” says Rees. “So when I can show up to make a difference, to help a teacher today I feel that I am paying back my dues. It’s important to them so it’s important to me. And of course we have some awesome teachers in our province that need help from people like me.”
Back at NB Power Rees initiated the Cybersecurity Internship Program for recent high school graduates. In June 2018 he hired his first intern, Paul Rosal, who had just graduated from Leo Hayes High School.
Rosal had found his way to the cybersecurity field via the CyberTitan competition as a member of Leo Hayes’ team. One of his dad’s friends who works in the tech sector told him about the NB Power internship and suggested he apply.
He got the job, which pays a full-time salary with benefits, and an opportunity for on-the-job learning. The 18-year-old has since earned his first level of professional certification thanks to his work at NB Power and is enrolled as a part-time student at UNB in computer science, while continuing to work full-time at NB Power.
“A full-time job out of high school in Fredericton is pretty unique,” says Rosal. “Fredericton is becoming a cyber hub. It’s this new opportunity so why not check it out.”
Lisa Hrabluk is a writer and owner of Wicked Ideas Media. Find me on Wicked Ideas’ Facebook page or on my personal LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.
School Works is a solutions journalism project and partnership between Wicked Ideas and the New Brunswick Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (EECD) Anglophone Sector.
