2024 Partnership, Sponsorship, and Collaborator Program
The CyberWatch Center mission is to create and commercialize cutting-edge education, information, and training delivery programs, systems, and content that increase the readiness of students and professionals to learn, become certified, and masterly perform cybersecurity functions and roles to produce a more diverse pool of talent with skills needed to protect organizations and improve national security.
We seek partners, sponsors, and collaborators that seek to close the Readiness Gap
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports that just over 62% of students entering postsecondary education can complete their degree in six years. Excluding the most selective universities whose students complete their degree programs at much higher rates than all other institutions of higher learning, the national degree completion rate declines to below 50%. Community colleges fare much worse, with only 28% of students completing a degree within four years. In other words, between one-third and nearly three-quarters of entering students fail to be added to the prospective resource pool. Furthermore, some estimate that only about 20% of those sitting for a professional certification exam are eventually able to pass it. Thus, depending on whose statistics are used, only about 3-12% of entering postsecondary students can expect to be ready to fill cybersecurity jobs upon graduation. If the failure rates in the education system were evaluated using the industry quality metric of Six Sigma, the education process quality would be rated between a -0.38 and 0.33 sigma, likely the worst among major industries.
Our Partnership, Sponsorship, and Collaborator Program enables organizations to join in this mission by supporting multiple or individual programs to close the readiness gap .
