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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Students’ Cyber Skills Win Contest

North Hollywood High School students are on a career path economic development experts and employers say delivers good pay, little competition and almost no chance of being offshored. For the second year in a row, the school’s Team Togo won the title of Best Overall Cyber Team at the California Cyber Innovation Challenge cybersecurity competition at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo in June. The contest, now two years old, has jobs and businesses in mind. GO-Biz, Gov. Jerry Brown’s economic development and job growth office, and a group of businesses, state agencies and educational organizations including the Los Angeles Unified School District and Cal Poly, formed the CyberCalifornia coalition, which puts on the contest. The event helps the coalition meet its goal to give students better access to technology careers. Sid Voorakkara, GO-Biz deputy director of external affairs, said the office sees every industry – from health care to finance to autonomous vehicles – needing cybersecurity employees. “These industries are going to lead from California, and California realizes we’re going to have to create our own workforce,” Voorakkara said. Amazon Web Services Inc. – Amazon.com’s cloud computing service provider; Dell Inc. of Round Rock, Texas; HP Inc. in Palo Alto and others gave technical advice to the competition organizers and helped plan some of the challenges, Voorakkara said. There’s a clear need for cybersecurity workers. Cyber Seek, a Department of Commerce-affiliated website that tracks the number of cybersecurity job openings versus workers, says California has 45,000 open positions, and the Los Angeles and Long Beach areas have 13,675 openings. Entry-level positions can deliver average annual salaries between $70,600 and $94,000. Scott Young, president of workforce development at automation consultancy ListenToSee Inc. in Thousand Oaks, helps push the state’s effort on the community college level. He said the competition legitimizes the industry to young people and gets them interested. “If we don’t have people to secure our business systems or government systems, that’s a big financial drain,” Young said. – Carol Lawrence

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