The Department of Defense will be hiring nearly 3,100 people – up from 900 people – for it’s Cyber Command. Fred Schneider, Cornell professor computer science, suggests a hiring strategy that includes heavy, tailored training for needed skills.
Schneider says:
“The recent boom in computer science undergraduate enrollments is not going to be enough to help the Department of Defense with its hiring needs. There are too many other opportunities, most of which are far more lucrative.
“Moreover, the skill sets that the Department of Defense and others are immediately seeking for cybersecurity focus on things that are rarely taught in university settings – reverse engineering and the like.
“The Department of Defense would be best served if they hired bright people who know about computing, and then planned to educate them about the specific skills that are needed for the defensive and offensive roles.
“This circumstance is not new for the Department of Defense or for the federal government. No university teaches its physics students what they need to know for designing nuclear weapons, and the National Security Agency has been running a first-rate program on cryptosystem design and analysis for some years – because that aspect of cryptography is not taught in universities either.”
RSS