Okay, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to New America. My name's Ian Wallace. I'm the co-director of the cybersecurity initiative here in New America, and as you came in, you may well have seen that part of New America's mission is sort of renewing America for the digital age. And there are a few topics as directly relevant to that as the one that we're discussing today, the sort of theme of cybersecurity and training the cybersecurity workforce through apprenticeships and through work-based learning. The cybersecurity workforce has been a central topic of the sort of cybersecurity work that we've done here in New America ever since our initiative was established three years ago in part because of the support for that by our funders at the Kuluk Foundation. And now that we have a partnership with Florida International University, we are very eager to look for innovative ways of bringing together higher education and the business community to do innovative and new and interesting things. In that endeavor, we are very fortunate in the cybersecurity team to count on the partnership of the Center for Education and Skills here at New America, represented by Brent Puffin, who I will introduce in more detail shortly. And others at New America who are focused on similar issues. If you haven't done it already, I encourage you to go online and look at the shift commission report looking at the future of work that our colleagues recently completed with Bloomberg. So when we realized it was National Apprenticeship Week and National Cybersecurity Careers Week coming together this week, we felt that we should really pull together an event to have a discussion. In part because I think there is a useful discussion to be had about the utility of work-based learning in this space, the opportunities and indeed the barriers to take forward. But also because it's a topic that is more often discussed than actually understood. So putting a little bit of clarity on that could be useful. And we have a particularly good group of panelists to guide us through that. Coming down from the far end, as I mentioned, Brent Puffin is the deputy director of the Center for Education and Skills here at New America and is also a relatively recent veteran of the Labor Department where he's been working many of these issues for several years. And next to him we have Marion Merritt who is from the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education which is based out of the Department of Commerce but works across government on cybersecurity, workforce issues and she is the lead for industry engagement at NICE. And then next to me I have Debbie Hughes who is from the Business Higher Education Forum an organization very much focused at the intersection between education and business as the name suggests and she is the Vice President for Higher Education Workforce. We were hoping to have, I should say Margaret Leary from North Virginia Community College. Unfortunately she called in late last night to say that she is too sick to be here. I hope she is watching online and I hope she gets well soon but given the experience that these guys have I think we'll be able to cover many of the ed issues with the team that we have. We are going to, I'm going to ask a few questions, we're going to have a conversation and then towards the end we will open it up for questions from the audience and indeed online. For those people who are watching online feel free to tweet questions through the chat. You am cyber account or the at New America Ed account using the hashtag cyber apprentice and the team here will be monitoring that and will feed in your questions as appropriate. So just before I start finally I'd just like to give a shout out to Laura Bates and Mike Preble at the front here who are literally the brains behind the cyber workforce work that we do here. So if you're inspired or indeed outraged by anything here feel free to talk to the panellists but also talk to these guys about how we can take the conversation forward beyond this. So let's get into the issues. Brent just sort of level set and also provide some clarity. Tell us what apprenticeships are, how they fit into the wider work-based learning suite of opportunities and how cyber, how apprenticeships rather are being thought of right now because in some ways they're missing a little bit of renaissance in fact it's national apprenticeship week is significant. Sure. Thank you Ian for having me on this and it's been great partnering with you on this work. So apprenticeship in a nutshell I guess everybody sort of has their image of what they see when you hear the word apprentice or apprenticeship. For a long time at least in the United States apprenticeship has been seen as a pathway to a certain type of career or certain types of jobs namely those in the construction sector to some extent manufacturing but at its essence really what apprenticeship is is it's a way of learning. It's a way of learning that combines some what I would call these kind of four corners, four corner elements. It partners on the job, structured, mentored on the job training with related instruction and likely in a classroom based setting and it pairs those things together. The other two corners relate to what you kind of get out of an apprenticeship. Some type of formal assessment of skills that have been determined and standardized that an employee would need to get the job done and some type of credential that's portable and valued across the industry as a whole. So those are kind of the basic four corners. Unfortunately it's a little bit more of a complex thing when you get down to what is an apprenticeship in the United States. We have the registered apprenticeship system. We also have a variety of non-registered apprenticeship programs that follow some general norms. I won't get into a bunch of details of how that relates. If you want to head down that path with us I'm more than happy to walk down that journey. But the idea is that really apprenticeship is this way of that really uniquely pairs learning on the job that's contextualized with learning that's happening in the classroom. The thing that I think sets apprenticeship apart from other types of work based learning is the role of the employer themselves in that program. The employer in the case of an apprenticeship versus say an internship is not only responsible for what happens on the job, they're also taking a very heavy hand in what happens in the classroom. In many cases at least in this country they're paying for what happens in the classroom. So the idea that also sets apprenticeship apart from other forms of work based learning is the prominent role of industry in the delivery of the program. So I think part of what's going on in the United States right now is that there's been this broad based recognition that apprenticeship does not have to be sort of the lone domain of only a couple of our industry sectors that it can be applicable as a form of learning across a number of other industries whether that's healthcare, information technology and cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing most recently has been picking up on a lot of the apprenticeship work. These are areas where apprenticeship has the potential to grow. I say that there's a couple of things driving the motivation for that. One, we hear a lot about the skills gap in this country. Apprenticeship represents in what I would say a skills gap compromise where usually we have employers saying education won't give us the workers we need. You have education institutions saying you don't train your workers anymore. Apprenticeship has kind of become this convenient compromise for policy makers to say well here's a way that you two can cooperate and deliver something that where everybody's getting a little bit more of what they want out of it. I think that the last thing I just say is I think the overall interest today in expanding apprenticeship which has really started I say about three years ago, three, four, five years ago is around solving a couple bigger picture issues too for both industry who are facing some pretty large challenges not just around finding skilled workers today but a more diverse labour market how do they tap into more diverse talent, an aging workforce how are they going to backfill these jobs as their workforce continues to age but also the changing nature of work and the impact of technology. At the end of the day education institutions will never be able to keep up with the advancement of technology that's happening in the workplace. So how can employers play a much more structured intensive role in helping workers ensure that they're keeping their skills up to date. The last thing from an education perspective there's huge equity implications in our country today around the affordability of higher education as well as the relevance. If you're going to spend the time and resources in higher education ideally it's going to be an opportunity on the other side for you. So I think that that motivation on sort of the supply side of the equation is driving a renewed interest particularly from policy makers but also more traditional post-secondary institutions which will be part of the topic today. So that's a high level overview I hope that helps kind of set some of the ground and we'll go from there. Thank you. Marion, one of the things building directly on Brent's points, that sort of literally out as a sector is that the government has a direct interest in quality workforce and that's recognized by the fact that NICE exists within the department of commerce. Could you just tell us a little bit more about sort of what NICE is, what you do, but also how NICE is thinking about sort of NICE learning apprenticeship as a way into jobs in the sector. So NICE is the national initiative for cybersecurity education and despite our name we really cover the gamut of the cybersecurity workforce issues and as an organization we've been around for a couple of years. We have an annual conference that in fact some of you may have recently attended in Dayton where we convene a community of educators and industry and government. Everyone who's really invested in resolving the cybersecurity workforce shortage and of course as we talk about this shortage, the 0% unemployment, some might say well if you get any sort of training in cybersecurity there must be a job waiting for you. But of course we know that there's a mismatch in the marketplace at the moment where young people are coming through perhaps community college programs that are quite rigorous in the centers of academic excellence as a result and may not find employment as readily as we may hope. We see bias in the hiring market towards those with four year degrees and advanced degrees. However when you look at the community of those going for masters and PhDs the vast majority of them are foreign nationals who may not have the capacity or the ability to receive a security clearance which is often a necessity for government or contract or work. So we have a number of issues happening in the marketplace. They layer onto that transitioning veterans, many of whom may have received tremendous cybersecurity related work experience in their careers but may not be given kind of the coaching and the education to transition into the civilian workforce. And then as Brent pointed out we have some aging population of those who are currently in cybersecurity. So what NICE is doing in convening this conversation and raising some of these issues, bringing partners together is hopefully working towards resolving a number of these issues or at least drawing more attention to them. For those of you in the room who walked in there was a one-pager out there in the lobby about cybersecurity apprenticeships but we offer a number of pieces of educational material on this topic highlighting educational opportunities, highlighting scholarship for service the cyber core where young people can get their tuition and expenses reimbursed if they commit to working at the federal, state, local, or tribal governments for a period of time after they graduate. So for those out there who are interested in working with NICE we have beyond the annual conference we meet on a monthly basis online in a working group. We have regular subgroup meetings on a variety of topics like training and certification, collegiate, workforce where people of like-minded concern get together and hash through some of these issues. We have monthly webinars, we just recently did one on the topic of those on the autism spectrum and could they potentially enter into cybersecurity careers. So as you can start to understand we're really looking at a broad number of opportunities to resolve these issues and very open to collaboration with others those in the room and online. So apprenticeships as we all recognize could be one of the tools in the toolbox. They're not a fast-paced solution especially if you look at the registered apprenticeship program, 18 to 24 months. They require a great depth of understanding and commitment from the employer population and they may need a little bit more hand-holding for those who are not yet involved. And it's not a mass production line. You know we're not talking about hundreds and hundreds of people. One employer may have a few apprentices. So in terms of capacity building I think it's going to be one of our opportunities but not the only one. I want to go on and talk about some of the other opportunities in a moment but first of all let me bring Debbie. Debbie where you sit at the business higher education forum you are literally at the meeting place between these sort of two groups that Brent was talking to who some people have sort of seen as slightly working past each other and apprenticeships being the opportunity for them to come together. Sitting where you sit looking at both sides, what do you see as the opportunities for apprenticeships in the cyber security workforce space? Yeah so I think building on what the other panelists were saying we see sort of three core tenants that are involved in cyber security hiring. First and foremost is the credential. Second is certification. And third is work experience. And so when you look at the job postings online the majority of job postings today over 90% of them in cyber security require a bachelor's degree and just about 90% of them ask for three to five years of work experience. So what that shows you is this is not a place for community college graduates with associate's degrees which we're not sure is true or not. It's just what the postings are signaling and it looks like there are no entry level positions. Now from our perspective you see there are different areas where the government in this space has been leading the charge so a lot of these job wrecks have been answering the call to what government contractors or the government are asking for in their job wrecks. But as many more sectors become technology companies and have much larger needs in cyber security we're finding that in financial services for instance or the insurance or healthcare other sectors are using requirements in these spaces just following them. And so when we ask what is it and why do you need these different job requirements they have not necessarily done internal analysis to the degree that NICE has created these common frameworks. And so what we see as an opportunity in terms of work based learning experiences apprenticeships internships and the like are that you can actually start to pair employers with higher education and to think about how do you close that need using work based learning to align with employers around getting them in earlier and possibly closing that work experience requirement. So we see cyber is this fantastic by its nature a high skill high demand field. It has a lot of infrastructure that's already been commonly defined where most emerging fields don't have common definitions like NICE does and yet you're not necessarily seeing the alignment of all of the parties coming together yet in the same way. So we see this and the apprenticeship space if it could be commonly defined and employers to recognize it and to offer work experience requirements in their hiring processes and change their job postings we think you can really move the needle on that. So the obvious question and open it up to the entire panel. Are we seeing any examples of early adoption good leadership that the cyber security employers and indeed universities can learn from. And maybe in the cyber security sector and maybe elsewhere of examples that this actually does work. Right. Sure. So going back to this great thing why don't we see more of them. I don't think we can underestimate the rethinking to your point that for industry that what they have to go through to really deliver an apprenticeship program in terms of how they hire how they think about their workforce how they screen candidates how they develop the skills standards how they find mentors that are going to be in their company spend time and work with apprentices. It's a lot there. So change is required and employers particularly small and medium sized employers could really benefit most from these types of programs need support to start these programs. So where we have seen progress on apprenticeship in the information technology or cyber security or other emerging sectors is when there's this intermediary capacity that is there to really help hand hold and make the process of developing an apprenticeship and running an apprenticeship much more seamless and lower all those kind of transaction costs involved with you thinking how you do your business. So that's one thing intermediaries do is they can do this hand holding. The other thing they can do is they can bring many employers together. So to your point yes we do not see a lot of American employers in other countries apprenticeship functions at a huge scale. Here it really is very retail. A couple of apprentices here a couple of apprentices there. But these intermediaries can aggregate the need of multiple employers across an industry sector identify what their shared skills needs are and build a program from that and let employers customize maybe that 50 to 20 percent through their on the job. So we've seen for example an organization called Apprenti in Seattle Washington it's operating out of Seattle Washington but they're a function of the Washington technology industry association that have really been pioneering as an information technology apprenticeship intermediary they've been working with multiple employers of many different sizes to fill these needs and they're working with non-traditional higher education providers as well as some more traditional mainstream ones. We've seen that same model take place with even higher education institutions playing a role in that space. So there's some really interesting work going on in Maryland down in Virginia as well not close to here near the sort of larger military installations outside Norfolk. Tidewater Community Colleges has been a pioneer on cyber security apprenticeships. Again the innovation the common thread no matter what type of institution is playing this role is how do you partner with your industry work with them across a region to really kind of aggregate and make it easier for them to engage and run these programs and do something very different. The community based aspect that these apprenticeship intermediaries bring is extremely helpful because as capacity gets built even if the initial partners on the employer side maybe larger employers they can help explain what they're doing. They can also provide some clarity over job requirements and educational standards. The intermediaries are also going to help with the funding. They're federal funding opportunities that would be a GI bill for your veterans who are transitioning they'll understand what's required in order to qualify so that that partnership is really beneficial. And we at Nice a year ago actually did some community based grants that we called Ramps around the concept of really creating an ecosystem around the career pathways in cyber security. So while it wasn't focused on apprenticeships a number of those community based efforts have added apprenticeships as one of those capacity building tools that they've been using. And can you just give us a little bit more of a sense of how these ecosystems evolved. You have universities who want to be relevant. You have businesses who want people who have intermediaries who may be a business opportunity or the community decides they're necessary. How does this matchmaking process work at its best? Well I think out of the economic necessity of the local workforce development agencies who may be aware of some of the federal resources or you may have these really strong intermediary organizations as Brent referred to. But by convening the local employers and saying you know to communicate how they give an issue is this for you and are you already working with your local educators be at the community college or the four year institutions. You know in convening those conversations can often illuminate opportunities unto themselves and that's what we're saying the community wide approach is also great because one of the big opportunities or issues we also have is awareness of cyber security careers especially in the K-12 area. And so by convening as a community you can start developing programs not just to do internet safety programs as wonderful as those are but to say there are careers associated with this field and it's not too early to start engaging. So you can also partner with the competitions organizations such as cyber patriots or the summer camp programs such as GenCyber and really start to bring in all of these elements so that it's not suddenly something people hear about in the career counselor's office you know as they're exiting high school or planning their college career. And it's an organization that sort of plays that intermediary role. We've created a process that we call the strategic implementation process. So what we've found is that if you have an intentionality around these types of partnerships as a common goal though in our process you start with understanding the labor market in your region you bring together a group of employers and what we've found in emerging fields like cyber security or data science and analytics or AI or whatever it is if you bring together those who have a workforce need and that's not to exclude the human resource sides of it but we tend to bring together executives in decision making spaces who oversee talent and so have a deep knowledge. We get them to come together and commonly define their needs of what they're looking for from graduates. And what we've found in cyber security is that you can come to complete consensus on it. There is an understanding by the industry as to what it is that they are looking for and hoping that graduates have in terms of technical and 21st century skills and that they will come together and sit peer to peer and sit competitor to competitor because they are looking for graduates to come out with a certain baseline set of skills and then compete with training and things like that on the end. So going through that process is extremely productive and important. It's created communities around industry. It's also allowed common voice for sectors and companies but very importantly we then have higher ed in our case because we tend to work with post-secondary institutions. We have them come back and tell you what they're already doing and map what they're doing to what was just asked for because there is a misconception that colleges and universities are not doing these things and most often they are doing almost entirely what is being asked for but maybe it's not in a credential or a major or a minor or something that employers can see and recognize. So by having that translational activity just and it's nothing more than convening getting folks together to commonly define things, having in higher ed then respond, being able to build that common language that they can then come to the table and understand each other you are able to then build programs and pathways and response and apprenticeship programs and internship programs that meet the needs in a way that otherwise you come to the table with different languages. These processes allow them to create peer-to-peer relationships and what I've found is that at the end of the day there's an individual at a company whose job it is to find talent and who is passionate about working with higher ed or education to build their talent pipeline because they have a need and you have folks at higher ed two and four year institutions who are passionate about working with industry so that their graduates have places. They don't necessarily find each other unless you go through these processes. Finding those is very important. That being true, is it just a question of time or is there a sort of scalability issue that you and your organization can't be everywhere? Which leads to the question is there a sort of policy fix that can take that approach and make it easier for more people to have those conversations? Well certainly given what nice you heard these frameworks which provided commonly defined definitions which don't tend to be the case in all sectors having industry validation of those and using them in their hiring practices definitely being done in the contractor space I think in the professional services outside of that it's starting but there's work to be done and then programs like the Centers for Academic Excellence there's no overarching accreditation body in cyber security programs and run through the national security agency and DHS has become sort of the good housekeeping seal of approval for education programs but and so those types of outside validation where you understand what industry needs can respond have a good housekeeping seal of approval and then very importantly and this is the part that I think we need the most work on in this space is to come full circle with employers to bring HR into the conversation with executives and then rewrite job postings and include recognition and hiring in these spaces. We've helped build up many new internships in cyber security and what you find is these students in these programs these employers have come to the table they've said everything they want, higher ed has responded, you have graduates, you have freshmen who have been told by executives come to my company, everyone will get an internship and so all those freshmen put in their resumes to the normal recruiting pipeline and they get told by HR we don't hire freshmen interns come back to us in three years right so unless you come full circle to be able to recognize this type of talent it's sort of a missing link at the end and that's probably an area that all of us could work better on come back to accreditation I totally agree from a policy standpoint one thing is helping ensure wheels aren't getting reinvented and there's standards and there's an idea and I totally agree I think cyber security is probably much more well positioned to do that given sort of all the work NICE has done than a lot of these other emerging sectors but the other kind of two things from a policy standpoint because I think you're touching on something that's very it's clear but it's frustrating about scale for apprenticeship which is this is very seem very localized and like partnerships coming together how do you make people work together the truth is you can't but from a policy standpoint what you can do is create an environment with our incentives for them to come to the table so I mean so we have to look at from one hand how do we think of apprenticeship and other forms of work based learning quite frankly as more of a mainstream responsibility or a thing of interest for higher education institutions or post secondary institutions more broadly to show that this matters for your mission this you can get paid for it this is important work so how do you send them to come to the table and then sort of on the industry side you know the incentives you hear a lot about tax credits but I'm not going to go into what I have mixed feelings about that but the other side of it is how do you send employers to cooperate and pool resources and work with higher education institutions and that's another interesting policy frontier the last thing is put flexible resources on the ground for the intermediaries that can actually be sent to pull them together and yank them by the collar and say we can do something about this and there have been some federal funds albeit the municipal ones to support new intermediary capacity there's something called the Chance Act that's been introduced that talks specifically about cyber security and information technology intermediaries so that seems to be another area where policy makers connect I spent 18 years in industry and I'm relatively new to government there's a selfish need here I mean every employer that is complaining they can't find the people they need they have invested reason to want to play in this area and the benefits to them in terms of you know you're going to get talent that is trained exactly the way you need them and you're going to acquire great employee loyalty in an industry where people job hop every 18 months I mean there's so many positive factors for the employers to participate in apprenticeship programs that I just feel like we're at the edge of a good precipice where you know we're going to pick up some momentum here as more awareness builds in the employer pools employers start looking at each other as competitors in the apprenticeship space you know you don't want to be last on this you want to be first so much has been done at the federal level and the community has been guided by the federal level but you're starting to see states every conversation you have the governor wants to be the cyber state Maryland the cyber state Virginia the cyber state fill in the blank the cyber state you're seeing governors and their chief technology officers or their secretaries of technology take a very prominent leadership role being asked by the state to create incentives for aligning two and four year programs to getting them CAE certified to giving incentives for apprenticeships there is a lot of momentum going from retail to sort of platform I think at the state level to have governors take a leadership role and building off of what's happened at night not reinventing the wheel but sort of planting the rolling flag and becoming the cyber state we just drilled down a little bit on incentives because I was telling what Erin said about there being a business incentive for the private sector to get into this space there is also a sort of public policy opportunity to create the framework within which that is easier or harder depending on how it's played not the least of which is sort of funding opportunities and one of the challenges in this space is there are actually quite a lot of incentives out there which are not well known to many of the either employers or educational institutions what's the biggest thing that people are missing in terms of the opportunities are out there and what are the policy fixes that could make a relatively big difference relatively easily sure so I'll just take this first and please jump in America is an exceptional place we're exceptional in apprenticeship in that we're the only country that makes essentially employers literally pay for every aspect of it both what happens on the job which they should but also the classroom instruction whereas you go to other countries whether that's the UK, Germany, Switzerland that part of the apprenticeship is subsidized by the public sector and it's subsidized by the public sector because there's a public good the idea is that the apprentice is not being trained just to the standards of one company but industry wide so they're not trapped it's portable so one of the missing pieces is really focusing on how can we help encourage more employers to get engaged with apprenticeship by showing that that education component is something the public sector has been compelling interest to invest in so one way of doing that is putting a ton of new resources behind it America maybe is another exceptional place where that's probably not possible in the near horizon but we do spend a lot of resources already on post-secondary and on workforce that could be better leveraged to support apprenticeship opportunities I'm sure folks have heard about different possible opportunities funding to the Higher Education Act presents sort of a number of programs that subsidize higher education there's a couple of those that are probably better designed to support apprenticeship than others the ones that I would say are Perkins well Perkins is part of H.E.A but I would say Federal Work Study Higher Education Act so Federal Work Study Funds could be an interesting way of how they can be flipped to support sort of apprenticeship programs the Perkins Act and reauthorization I think that's a huge opportunity to better support apprenticeship it's institutional based funds so essentially you know Perkins in general supports our vocational career and technical education system both the secondary but also the post-secondary level that funding goes to institutions to help them sort of set up apprenticeship programs it could I guess I should say could be we've seen Perkins been used as a platform for apprenticeship particularly for youth in many parts of the country we could do more and use it as a better lever the other kind of area that I think is untapped is workforce system we put several the money is declined but there's a lot of money in the workforce system the federal workforce system that's available in every state in every community across the country you have funding support both the on the subsidize on the job training through the workforce system called OJT contracts you also have funding through the individual training accounts that the workforce system offers the problem is how can we better make sure that the folks that are really kind of control how these funds can be used the state and local level can be better leveraged to support apprenticeship it's not just employers that don't know a lot about apprenticeship the education institutions and a lot of the existing workforce and training infrastructure does not know a lot about apprenticeship so there's a lot of learning to be done to show how we can better leverage those resources and if we can count apprentices in those systems we can more powerfully we recently had a discussion in response to an executive order on the topic of the cybersecurity workforce and what was pretty clear to all the participants is that same old same old is not going to do it and the apprenticeships or other things I mean the term space war was that metaphor was used quite a lot that's a shortage of cybersecurity talent of 285,000 in the United States alone we're not going to get there in 1Z2Z efforts so we're going to need some pretty significant changes in how we do things and whether that's policy or whether it's a you know just convening more robust environments with employers and providing them the tools so they can do the thing they want to do already we're going to need to see some of those things happen I'm not sure if we can wait for the investment coming from the federal level I think we need to move more quickly than that just what you mentioned it the executive order required some work by federal government departments to sort of bring together what's happening on workforce how just to bring people up to date how is that process going and what will we likely see in the future of the results of that recommendations were around things such as the scholarship for service program that you should be dramatically expanded and of course that's a feeding system for talent in the government level which of course is in a tremendous place for people to get their first skill acquisition to work you know in cybersecurity in the government level state local federal and tribal anyway but back to the executive order I think we're still waiting for some reaction to the recommendations I think it's worth mentioning that as every company becomes a cyber company and every CEO is finding that this topic is of tremendous importance probably of increasing importance every day they are thinking about how they bring in top talent and not every sector and industry is thought to be on the cutting edge of cybersecurity and so we have been seeing and you hear that if every company is going to have to compete with the Google's and the Facebook's and the Northrop Grumman's every company is competing with every other company across all the sectors so it is not being coalesced into different sectors and so one of the areas of real things that can be made is sectors coming together to really understand where their strengths are and either do it through a charm offensive where you encourage folks to come into your sector because of mission driven experiences or because it's cutting edge or whatever it is particularly in ones like financial services where you don't necessarily need to follow the government requirements that OPM and others have said this idea of work based learning and apprenticeship can create a farm team for lack of a better way of explaining it that you create relationships and can directly hire and compete in a way that you could sidestep having to go on the open market and compete across every company in the United States and so I think a big having sectors come together understand their strengths and really think about how they can build the talent pipeline through work based learning earlier is something that could have very large gains What do you see as the sort of nub of those collaborations I mean traditionally in the apprenticeship space trade unions have been the basis for this that isn't so true one opportunity is trade organizations there are a number of trade organizations who operate in this space but haven't necessarily fully thrown themselves into this yet what do you think the best opportunities are in order to bring that kind of collaboration It's funny you should bring up the term unions because we had a conversation about this at the nice conference in Dayton and that was brought up that traditionally in apprenticeships you're going through a union they're going to help find you employment so here in cyber security we need the employer to be part of the program from the beginning so the relationship is employer and employee so there really isn't a lot of space for that union element necessarily and when you talk about organizations who are trying to be the leader of what a perfect entry level cyber security person looks like I think there's still a lot of competition in that space where people are at the certification bodies or other organizations in this space and usually those things the marketplace decides the beauty of the apprenticeship model is that the employer is defining perhaps in collaboration with other employers but they're defining what they need and they really don't necessarily need all of these other organizations weighing in unless there's additional benefit either they've taken the burden of the education process off the employer when we talk about apprenticeships or they're finding the talent and bringing them to them which I think would be a great service and you talked about sort of the mapping of the workplace issue and I just wanted to throw a plug out there for cyberseek.org if not everyone's familiar with that that was an initiative, SEEK SEEK.org is a heat map so to speak of where cyber security jobs are and what's useful both to the employer and to the job applicant is you start to normalize the language around the nice workforce framework you start to see career pathways emerge you can see what the job requirements are be it a bachelor's degree to your point 90% of the job openings do require a bachelor's degree but they may also say and you need these certifications and you can start to also see if you live in this location in the country not so many jobs here I might need to relocate to find opportunities so the more information out there for the employee and the employer it should normalize some of these competitive issues some more questions from me and then we're going to open it up to the floor so please be thinking of your questions first one you mentioned accreditation and Debbie actually earlier mentioned this sort of the accreditation trap the fact that in this space many employers at least think what they need is people who have certifications which themselves require on the job training so in order to get a job you need to have an accreditation in order to get that accreditation you need to have a job and that obviously makes it hard to enter the sector is that a problem that other sectors have dealt with and addressed Brent or is it something that over time the competition within the sector will resolve and that we'll get to a different kind of way of certifying that people have the skills they need I would say that the overall certification issue but what credentials communicate competence to employers is something that every industry sector has dealt with I would go back and say what's advantageous about the cyber industry sector is that they've done so much work trying to standardize and create sort of a common language around skills and certifications that it's become an advantage but to your point what you laid out those drawbacks to that is what are the requirements that are needed to get there and is that making it harder for people to access those jobs I would say the sector that is probably grappling with this credentialing certification issue alongside cyber is healthcare it's one that's obviously been you know it's a heavily credentialed sector it's one where also apprenticeship is pushing on the frontiers of an industry trying to say you know well do you have to have this certain type of education pass these certain types of exams to do these jobs could this be learned on the job it's part of getting that done and you know it's going to be an issue that has to be dealt with I think part of it is you know what are employers using the certifications for is really the key question here you know on one hand we've talked a lot about sort of the job openings that require a bachelor's degree to even get your foot in the door I think there's some question to what extent employers are using that out of habit versus necessity and whether they're kind of using these certain types of credentials as a screen for skills they really haven't can't articulate well we hear the word soft skills, employability skills, 21st century skills or whatever it might be so there's that part of the equation but then there's the actual sort of professional certification itself which I would kind of kick to you all to say how this is playing out in the cyber security sector but we know in healthcare that there is some interest in creating a little bit more of kind of a progression that allows people to kind of turn their certifications and progressively move up in their job and sort of when it starts as an entry level then they're getting work experience they're creating attachment to the employer, the employer is seeing they can do the job the employer is willing to kind of stick with them and invest with them so they can get the certifications to take the next job and that's sort of it's a stop and go in healthcare but I don't know how that could work in cyber where there's a lot more even challenges around who can get in the door. What we're observing is a lot of blended models so traditional education layered with some certifications because as the employer doesn't fully understand the quality necessarily that people are getting in the traditional education environment so these certifications become sort of a signal. You've done this class work and this topic and this is your professor and then you took this certification exam so I start to understand as an employer what you bring to the table and I think that's a really good benefit for somebody out there though who's trying to upskill maybe they're an entry level person in cyber security and they want to continue and these certifications are also an additional form of traditional education book learning is usually involved and there is some practical skills in there as well. Outside of traditional education there are also the so-called boot camp type of environments and some work, some not so much they're led and some are community based so there's a lot of these sort of innovative models that are using these certifications to help the employer figure out what the talent can do. Sorry, go on. CyberSeq data or you look at the which is powered by burning glass and you look at the number one area of need it's around what they call CISSP's they require five years of experience and so that is a requires you to think about what are the solutions and what do they look like and for our side one of the solutions is around what constitutes a quality work based learning experience and including an apprenticeship and how can you have it count towards those five years. How can you use the time that students are in post secondary to allow them to count down on that clock. Second is around creating entry level or pathway jobs that also count and constitute closing that clock so you may not enter into a cyber security job you may enter into a network or an IT job but that needs to be able to count towards the CISSP's and allow for a very clearly articulated pathway for somebody to get from point A to point B Now that those pathways exist but they haven't been necessarily very clearly defined for somebody to understand where they can go where they can get to and how we can sort of look at that CISSP number which is one of the sort of clear indicators of what people think of as a skills gap and drill into it to think about how can you use work based learning, how can you change credentials and then how can you change probably some of those employers who don't really need it but are using it as a proxy. I think there are three different things you can do with the certifications. Not necessarily get rid of all of them but think about solutions for closing that. One of my favorite statistics which is from NYSES website is I think if you look at the Burning Glass data from 2015 the number of people, the number of jobs requiring a CISSP qualification is pretty close to the number of people who have ever been awarded that qualification which sort of speaks to the underlying problem but I also and I think I'm right in saying that one of the challenges in bringing together educational institutions and the sort of accrediting bodies is that those educational institutions are often under quite a lot of pressure to graduate people within a certain period of time in order to meet and stay to all sort of national statistics. A is that correct and B is the scope at the state level at the national level to address that in a way that prevents what is obviously meant as a good thing getting in the way of exactly the sort of approach that Debbie was talking about. To start real quick, yes they are under that pressure but at the same time there's not a lot of compelling evidence that we're delivering on where we want to be on that goal right now. So even while that sort of expectation I guess and pressure has been created still we have just over 50% of college going students graduating within six years. So I mean that's just a baseline fact out there that even if we want to move higher and we want to continue to make progress on that there's scope for trying new things and innovation that the other kind of side of that is that the only outcome we should be carrying about. I mean people are spending time and resources to get into these institutions to come out what are they getting on the other side and how can certifications as well as sort of infusing more of the industry work based learning experiences not only help people engage and get them to get over the line because they're seeing where they're learning is going but they'll have an opportunity on the other side and I think that's sort of when we think more about not just completion but also one of the labor market outcomes of people coming outside of these institutions that would help kind of shift the conversation. One question from me before we open up. One of the things we've spent some time focused on here in New America is looking at sort of stating local cybersecurity but that has also led us into looking at the roles of small and medium enterprises operating often within states and cities. How do we make it easy for those smaller organizations to benefit not just from apprenticeships but sort of work based learning and it seems fairly clear that big organizations who have the resources can properly train their workforce. Is there an opportunity to make it easier for small and medium enterprises to play in this space? Apprenticeship is the perfect model because inherent in apprenticeships is the mentoring role. You must have a dedicated mentoring relationship within the organization. It could be at the intermediary but ideally there's somebody with the skills that you're trying to map towards and in that sense large organizations, small organizations still need that dedicated individual and hopefully they're getting some coaching and some development as well out of it. Apprenticeships is a perfect way for the smaller employers to really play a key role here. If you're a small employer and this is something that you think you would like to take forward, where is the place to go for some guidance on how to set something like that? Is there a person here? There is a registered apprenticeship system. It exists in all 50 states. 25 states run their own apprenticeship systems so to speak in partnership with the Department of Labor. They have representatives at the state most likely also at the local level to get in touch with for the 25 states that work with the federal government or our representatives again in every state to help work with this. That said, if we want to get apprenticeship to a new level these are a few people that are out there with the 30 million dollar budget that they're operating on is not going to be a universal resource. So I think we really need this is the principal challenge. How do we continue to build awareness? Pull more people under the tent. That includes higher education institutions. That includes workforce boards. That includes community organizations to get into the apprenticeship game and create sort of an infrastructure of scale that can be out there to help people, particularly small and medium sized employers, when they kind of catch the bug or the interest. And that's really kind of the challenge that's before us. Okay, questions. We have a microphone and so for the benefit of the people online if you could just wait till the microphone gets to you. If you could say who you are and any affiliation you have. For the Commonwealth of Virginia, which we're the cyber state. Governor McCullough did a incentive package that he specifically it was for doing cybersecurity apprenticeships. We actually had Dr. Leary assist us in writing our work processes in regards to where you were talking about the training and the assessment. The question is how, I never really heard you talk about the credential. You talked about the national credential in the four corners but at the back end of it you guys talked about the registered apprenticeship. But to get the credential you never talked about how to get the credential. And then the second thing is how do you believe we, meaning since we have an incentive program how can we get more employers involved. Because we kind of tried some avenues but I'm just trying to figure out what would work best. Since there are employers here too. It's a national apprenticeship certification. The Commonwealth has their own journeyman card. It's a credential. He talked about the four corners and he talked about the national credential that goes from state to state. We issue that because we are one of the 25 states that actually run our own apprenticeship program but it's governed by overseeing I should say federal program. You didn't mention how you go about receiving that national credential. So if you do a registered apprenticeship program you're going to engage with someone at the state, the federal level depending on where you are and what you're going to do is go through the registration process which is essentially developing a program. What that really means is defining the skills that needed to be built, how long it's going to take. There are certain requirements around sort of baseline hours that are spent training on the job, baseline hours that are spent training in the classroom and the program lays out if you go through and this is the CliffsNotes version but if you go through these things as you hit certain levels as you're hitting new skills you will get a wage gain. That's an important thing to know about registered apprenticeship programs. That's part of the deal. But if you get to the end you will get a national apprenticeship certification. Some states issue this but it is nationally recognized and what that says is something very important about what apprenticeship is or what might set it apart. It says that you are competent in an occupation and the purpose of internships is not to make you competent in an occupation it's to expose you to a career, connect you with an employer, help you demonstrate your soft skills. Apprenticeship is really a program about building competence in a way that is portable. So you can take that certification you can go from place to place. It's nationally recognized. It helps bring, you know, I'm sure that folks have different views on this but it certainly helps bring order to what can be somewhat of a busy and confusing credentialing space particularly when it comes to how do we recognize the time people put into high quality work based learning. That's the second question. One question I would have is of those who are currently participating if you look at the types of roles that they've identified as appropriate for, you know, the kind of cybersecurity apprenticeship I might look at other job openings from employers in the area that are similar and say we have this program to develop these skills. Would you be interested and bring them together with a partner who's already doing it so they can start to understand what it takes, you know, the requirements internally and externally and that might be a way of growing it but you'd also develop that peer-to-peer partnership that I think could really help some people overcome their concerns. Given the number of postings in Virginia and the number of companies I might look at some of those top companies, the top employers in cyber and go to their internship folks and bring the talent at the executive level and bring their internship folks to the table and have them have a conversation around their talent pipeline and tell them that you're thinking about it in an integrative approach and want to understand where they're fitting internship and where they're fitting apprenticeship, where they're fitting their high school outreach because most of them are not thinking about it all under one umbrella and that might get you some get them to start thinking about it in the same place. Have we seen any sort of conversations with sort of sector coordination bodies sort of feels like something where getting companies within sectors working together is a way of sort of building critical maps. So that, yes, that's been the secret sauce for nations that have been able to do this very well for a long time at scale as they engage industry associations chambers of commerce actively in this work. In fact, they're almost fully responsible for many parts of it which is very different here but we have seen a lot of really interesting movement where industry associations particularly ones that operate across multiple states have been able to kind of work on developing sort of a core program. I've mentioned sort of the Apprenti example, that's a technology association getting involved with that. When we drill down to the local level, I think we've seen some really interesting happen with regional chambers of commerce that have existing relationships employers, they know their growth sectors in that region, they know the right players both at sort of the C-suite level but also importantly HR folks and they are already doing things. Like you said, there's a lot going on out there, this in some respects become sort of a logical next step for how a lot of these industry associations and chambers have been already engaged heavily in workforce discussions. We work with the financial services round table, they have a cyber security working group what happened in that working group, every conversation they had came back to workforce every single one. There was a technology group, they bring together their CTOs, their CISOs, all of the leaders and every conversation came back to workforce. You see the same thing in the aerospace industry association. Every time you get these industry associations together and you're talking about cyber, the number one thing that they come back to is workforce and so they're very willing to think about how you come together on solutions. I think part of the issue is that it's very one by one right now and so these industry associations can play a very important role in creating sort of turnkey operations. They don't necessarily need to be that third party facilitator in the end, allowing the companies who are already coming to the table together as peers to be able to have sort of know how to engage in the same way just in different places is something that I think the chambers the business round tables, all these kind of industry associations are thinking very seriously about. I just wanted to say there is somebody from USDOL here, that would be me. I'd be glad to speak with folks individually if you have particular questions on the apprenticeship system although Brent did a fantastic job about doing it. Jim Foddy. What I just wanted to make a comment about resources, we've had this conference a couple of years ago we've had this competency based apprenticeship project going on for the past few years and there were two occupational frameworks in IT, the cybersecurity framework which maps to the nice framework very closely and also breaks it down by beginner, intermediate and advanced level competencies. And again these are ways of starting programs that break down on the time and really maps out some of the things that businesses have to do if they're getting engaged. And the IT generalist framework could also be a stepping stone into cyber work for those folks that don't have work experience yet. I think Jim raises an important point which the registered apprenticeship system gets a hard time quite a bit and there's a lot of interest right now I guess for the government that goes. So much of the time though around what it needs to and a lot of that is around it takes too long or it's too complicated to register an apprenticeship program. What Jim raises is sort of the time comes often from working with employers on developing these sort of skill standards what are the actual competencies that you want to learn through a program and that is a new process for many industries or individuals particularly small employers to sit down and say what job am I really trying to fill what are the kind of skills that are going to be needed what are other companies doing that maybe I could do more and that takes time and that's really that co-creation process that could be sped up if industry associations or larger industry groups created templates and models so those employers don't have to start from scratch. The state of South Carolina is a great example they've grown apprenticeship, registered apprenticeship over 700% in 10 years and they've done it by many respects and they work to support to start a program starting from scratch and so I think that's again a place for these industry associations and chambers that could play a particularly important role. I just wanted to throw out another issue in the cybersecurity realm and that's security clearances which I mentioned earlier. The very issue around the length of time somebody is participating in apprenticeship program could be an element in its favor if you add we will help you acquire a security clearance assuming that you qualify so I just throw that out there as something that could potentially be a benefit to participating in apprenticeship program and that would set you apart from the person who's just on their bachelor's degree absolutely see how that would be an incentive that's right hi my name is Gwen Costin I work for the federal government and my question is what if any work are you all doing encouraging these types of apprenticeship programs within the federal space well we've certainly been trying to understand the opportunity when it comes to cybersecurity and we're big proponents of all the entry level programs like scholarship for service as we discussed earlier so we're starting that conversation now and we think that it's absolutely appropriate at the federal level that we offer an opportunity for people to be trained and receive the skills but I am currently unaware of a federal based cybersecurity apprenticeship program there are a few federal hiring greed doesn't help on that but the OPM has been engaged in a few years around sort of what that would look like the Department of Labor actually have a couple of apprentices that are there but you know I think this is a huge point in the public sector to do certain things government should be a role model and in particular state and local governments that are really starving for cybersecurity talent this could be a huge opportunity for them and so I think that we need to if you talk about sort of rigid or unfamiliar hiring requirements for those of you USAJobs.com you're probably familiar with this you know how can we really unpack our workforce that we need in the public sector there's a huge diversity need in the public sector so how do we use apprenticeship as a tool and really role model I don't know if you're also talking just about sort of transitioning service members too in how to sort of get them engaged with earning the civilian side certifications prior to separation so there's been a lot of interesting work over the past few years with something called the skill bridge program to try to put education and training institutions on base for someone transitions that seems to be a big opportunity I'm not familiar if there's one specifically in for cybersecurity but how could we start to kind of... they tend to be regional you know a branch overall we're going to do these things for our cyber people and it could be but you've got some very strong initiatives in again Virginia San Diego so you know region by region you have some tremendous local partners who are actively going into the veterans the military operation and saying here we want to help your veterans transition to these tremendous careers but I think that it could be brought internally more so it's a tremendous opportunity but admittedly small programs at best at the current state what would encourage for example Knights to sort of take an active role in that is it going to be demand from departments or is it going to be something else that sort of encourages that kind of approach? It will be certainly on the normal hiring scale it is demand from individual departments and we have our challenges don't we in the federal government not only hiring but hiring people quickly so if you look at the candidates that you might have there may not have the time to wait until they can go through the approval processes I think that's a real challenge for us to be able to you know walk the walk here because if your apprenticeship program is 18 to 24 months long and it takes you typically a calendar year to go through approval processes you know who's going to wait More questions so we have three people back there and we'll work around you all in the Qo Hi I'm Rebecca Allen from General Assembly we're a global training company and I'd be just curious to hear each of your perspectives on kind of some of the pros and cons of traditional higher education and then some of the non-traditional players so like the boot camps like General Assembly in increasing the talent pipeline and just for a tiny bit of context GA right now is working with the Defense Department to create a cyber curriculum that we're piloting at Fort Gordon and the idea is that that will eventually translate into something that we're going to provide to industry partners in the area so I would love to hear more about what you think about that approach from my perspective as I said earlier I came from industry and one of the things that I had done was create a jobs program based around the premise that in cyber security if you have somebody with aptitude and you can you know train them and coach them and give them beyond the job skills you know the shorter period of time than a traditional four year degree it works with the employer's participation the employer deciding helping determine what the educational requirements are providing the on the job skills development and hopefully a promise of employment at the end where I think some of the non-traditional job programs don't do quite as well is when all the responsibilities on the participant to find employment and then you have this misunderstanding about you know what their purpose is so I am very supportive of the ones where the employers are really participants and have skin in the game and you know we really are making sure that what they're learning is appropriate for what the job market requires we did a survey recently of CIOs and CISOs this community of executives and found that as much as they are caring about cyber security and it was a cyber security survey those same individuals are highly preoccupied with emerging fields and skills for the future and an adaptable workforce and so I think what's very interesting in that comment is that these same individuals are thinking about jobs of today these large numbers of job posting and fields that they can't fill today but they are also tasked in their companies with thinking about their future workforce at exactly the same time in thinking if I can't fill it today I'm only going to exacerbate the problems of tomorrow so we've been really challenging companies to bring teams of folks within HR and within these spaces to communicate in different areas of need so whether it's General Assembly in upskilling your workforce that exists today or helping retrain folks to take the jobs of today versus somebody who needs a technician position which are extremely important or IT and networking or those with bachelors degrees or masters or we have been asking and challenging our companies to actually align their talent strategies and really think about each piece of it and then align those to the different institutions that can help plug it together largely you see these very segmented discussions division by division and I think that each one I don't think these are competitive areas I think these are areas that if aligned could be sort of a new age for the CHRO community like the new talent space thinking about this all as an integrative place when do boot camps work and when do they not work I think yeah so I mean boot camps aren't a monolith they're like education institutions there's ones that I mean let's think about what they try to sell they are selling the idea of connecting you to a job that is well-paying you'll have a career boot camps work when they do that they do that when they are talking about what you're speaking to you know when they really unpack what a business need is they work very closely with employers to develop curriculum programs and they deliver it in a way that positions the people that complete and they're supporting them to complete to get a job and make a good wage that gets a return on investment boot camps don't work when people pay a lot of money they spend time doing education and training and they get nothing out of it on the other side and so at the end of the day I think that for those organizations that start with business need and have truly authentic relationships with industry the boot camp is a powerful model to open up doors I think that there's some discussion right now about how do we ensure that sort of boot camps they're very good at filling needs a lot of the folks that are engaged with them have bachelor's degrees already how can we create more equitable opportunities and create sort of pathways for folks that are traditionally underrepresented in these jobs I think that's the question and the problem that boot camps a lot of them are trying to grapple with but that's the one that we'll have to look for also going ahead. In order to keep this on time there are two questions at the back so we're going to take both those two questions together if we may. We can let classrooms and professionals and companies to show students what careers are like all virtually through video chat though what's your plan for scaling apprenticeships to rural communities that have no industry at all locally in their area. I'm Costas Toregas from the George Washington University I'm an educator I wanted to channel Margaret Leary just a little bit because I work with her in the National Cyber Watch Center. You mentioned the numbers of jobs that are available and you mentioned bachelor's degrees and higher ed degrees are 90% required coming from a higher ed institution that does grant bachelor's and master's degrees. I'd like to take issue with that and first of all NICE has done a great job with the framework and the more I think that industry begins to use the framework will discover that the majority of cybersecurity jobs do not need that bachelor's degree or master's degree and so therefore the educational experience has to be focused towards the HR folks the Chico's the OMB's and the OPM's that begin to write the request for proposals that hire people and that industry hires too. I think Margaret would have taken exception to accepting the bachelor's requirement from the educational community. We came here to talk about apprenticeships but I think the role of community colleges has to be spoken and focused much more tightly and we do that through the National Cyber Watch Center where we have an apprenticeship and an internship program development now. Three questions I think to do very quickly Firstly how do we get better job requirements Secondly there is a question are bachelor's degrees important for later career or are there the need to get a bachelor's degree overstated and then the first question what scope is there for some online or non-physical presence when we're talking about apprenticeships and sort of wider work base? Pick anyone you like. I'll go with the rural one then you always want to start with the next slide. Sure so this is a dilemma you know at the end of the day you can't have more apprenticeship without an employer willing to hire an apprentice that sets it apart again. Apprentices and employees so what do you do when there's not sort of localized demand to even sort of start these types of programs? One thing I'd say is apprenticeship to be relevant as to follow the nature of work we see opportunities in rural areas for to participate more in online sort of the online economy and digital economy health care health care IT and coding has become sort of a distance based job we've seen Kaiser Permanente on California has a registered apprenticeship program in medical coding it's really excited and it is a completely virtual apprenticeship program. These people work from home they work from where they are on their computers that does not mean you can't create an apprenticeship opportunity out of it. If the work itself is online then the on the job training to some extent is online they take some things where they bring people in to talk about what's going on in the workplace they see their supervisors but much of the OJT hours are actually spent online and they created modules to do that. Learning is already online to some large extent so the classroom can also be executed that way. So virtual apprenticeships are a real possibility there's not a ton of them right now I think it'll take some sort of pressing frontiers to make it work but again as long as apprenticeship is following the job and following where the jobs go there's a huge opportunity there. The last thing I'd just say from the rural standpoint too is apprenticeship being thought of sort of a way to just meet initial skills gaps is one way of looking at it but another way is sort of as a component of an economic development strategy. We see states and governors and mayors saying how can we design sort of a ready made apprenticeship infrastructure so when we are attracting business or attracting companies to come invest in our region we can have a solution that's ready made to get there. So I think tighter integration with economic development initiatives is also going to be a big part of how we link apprenticeship to rural areas. I've got too long but I want to say this too. We're doing a lot of work on youth apprenticeship. We spent the past year looking at youth apprenticeship programs across the country and those are really starting with students still in high school. I was shocked to find that the majority of those programs are happening in ex-urban, nearly rural types of communities. There's something about employers in rural areas and how they work with their local education institutions that's just different than urban areas that's actually quite conducive to apprenticeship if there can be supports to get it done. So to say that apprenticeship is not something that's relevant for rural communities I think the reality is opposite. There's exciting work going on in Colorado with our piloting both in Denver as well as in the West Range area of the state as well and it's actually been a pick or a quick up in the rural area because the employers they know the educators, they want to do something good in the community, they want to keep the young people there is the most important thing and apprenticeships are a tool for doing that. It was not an endorsement for the need for bachelor's degrees. I think what we see in the postings and the aggregate data is that the business community is signaling that they're using the bachelor's degree as a proxy and that in this case I think most often is because it's driven through the government requirements and so our approach since we my approach has not been to move OPM. I think that is a movement that's happening in extremely necessary. Our approach has been to go to sectors that are not necessarily government driven and have conversations about why. Why are you writing your job postings like that? We started sort of retail company by company bringing them together, asking folks internally why are you requiring a bachelor's degree? Do you really need it? Can we change that? What are the actual skills and competencies you're looking for? We've now moved that out to sector round tables and industry associations but our approach is exactly what you're saying which is business is signaling that the bachelor's degree has tremendous currency and that it's not necessarily true that it needs to be but unless they start changing that that is sort of the message that keeps resonating and so we've been on the ground trying to change that and let me just add what is cyber security? A ten year old industry, we're all hungry for information and hopefully the more we identify these issues five years ago were we complaining about the fact that everyone was asking for a bachelor's degree?  We're starting to become increasingly aware similarly of the security clearance preventing so many employers from getting the talent they want at the pace that they need so the more we can shine light on some of these concerns hopefully we can address them and to your point by convening people and raising the issue I mean one of the things I like to ask people be they the hiring manager or the HR person is who put that requirement in there. The answer is often but we always put that in there. No one's asked So like for the financial service sector I just did, I've been doing work with them I'm quoting them, less than 10% of them of the companies are using CAE schools and their recruiting processes and less than 15% are using the nice framework or any national frameworks as part of their job and pathway process of talent thinking and so that to me shows that there's a need and that there's an opportunity. My guess and you know I haven't dug deeper into it is that other sectors are using their normal talent strategies so they're going to the schools that they know and possibly that they recruit from business schools because that's where they usually are looking for from students and haven't striated that to look specifically for cyber talent. I mean what's happening with the CAE programs in the two year space is that they are getting accredited in some like the lack of a better term. They are getting told that they are high quality and I don't think employers even know that and so there's a space to do this. I want to keep asking a question but I'm conscious we're bumping up against our hour and a half limit so therefore in one minute I'm just going to go down the panel each and ask you, each of your organizations is doing some really interesting work in this area. Can you just give us a very quick blast on what have you got coming up in the future that we need to look out for and then we'll bring this to an end. Debbie, do you want to start? My drum beat is that this is a fixable problem and that it, I'm not 100% sure we have a skills gap I think we have a supply and demand misalignment and the first step is to really understand articulation of needs. I think NICE has taken a very strong role in that and now is the time to have business recognize and align their needs with the talent and supply and so we've been working very closely on trying to break down the silos and bring this to sort of instead of an either or but an and conversation and certainly work based learning and apprenticeships has a big role to play in that. And for NICE the flag, the banner that I carry is really to get more industry involvement in this discussion because I think the education communities and at the federal level I think there's already been a lot of really great work done so I would just encourage folks from industry be they the hiring managers or HR or the C-suite to join us in our working groups to subscribe to our information and to participate in these robust conversations and become more aware of the great resources be it the NICE framework but also the CIEs as a great resource for talent as well as to learn more about how they can kick off an apprenticeship program. Sure, so this is a National Apprenticeship Week December will be Apprenticeship Month I guess in some respects for us at New America we have two big pieces of research coming out one of our priorities is being how we mainstream apprenticeship into our formal education systems to achieve scale and more diversity in terms of industries so we have in December 6th we'll be up here again releasing some work we've been doing on higher education and apprenticeship integration looking at issues around financing, accreditation, program design, etc. That'll be first and then after that we've been as I mentioned earlier we've been doing a lot of work in a youth apprenticeship space how do you connect build a more seamless pipeline between high school and apprenticeship opportunities that really function as kind of early college dual enrollment programs where students can start participating in apprenticeship earning post-secondary education credit earning credentials prior to graduation from high school so the following week we'll be having another event here on December 14th to talk about that work and some of the case studies we've done and how states are approaching this from scale and then later into the year too we're still continuing our drive to look at how apprenticeship can fit as an alternative provider within two particular growth industries healthcare and information technology and cyber security because those are real huge opportunities for expansion the industry need is there but there's going to be a lot of need for innovation around a lot of the issues that we've discussed today. Thank you very much on the cyber security side with Laura Bate and others we're going to be looking at how cyber security can be both an exemplar and a beneficiary of some of the discussions that we've been having here. Plenty to keep discussing please catch these folks as the panel ends but for now thank you very much to Brent Parkman, Marion Merritt and Debbie Hughes.