Udacity Launches School of Cybersecurity to Ready the Next Generation of Digital Defenders, Addressing a Widening Skills Gap

By AIT News Desk On Mar 24, 2021

Including Ethical Hacker Nanodegree program that aims to attract global learners with an opportunity to gain cutting-edge skills

Udacity, the global online learning platform that trains the world’s workforce for the careers of the future, launched its School of Cybersecurity to help address the growing need for skilled cybersecurity professionals. Through projects tailored to real-world scenarios that complement instructor-led sessions, the School of Cybersecurity is designed to provide learners with the practical experience and resources needed to protect their data and ensure maximum uptime in an era where managing online threats has become standard operating procedure for every enterprise.

The global information security membership association (ISC)² estimates close to half a million additional cybersecurity professionals are needed in the United States alone. Udacity’s School of Cybersecurity will help to close this talent gap with four Nanodegree programs including Introduction to Cybersecurity, Security Engineer, Security Analyst, and Ethical Hacker. Previously considered a grey area, ethical hacking is increasingly being embraced in the business world as organizations upskill their workforce and encourage employees to identify security vulnerabilities.

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“Over the last decade, constant public vulnerability disclosures and the growth of bug bounty programs have demonstrated the incredible need for collaboration with ethical hackers, which can only be accomplished by broadening the applicant pool to better reflect the communities where malicious hacking occurs,” said Dr. Christine Izuakor, founder of on-demand cybersecurity service platform Cyber Pop-up and a Udacity School of Cybersecurity instructor. “There’s no question diversity makes businesses better, and the cybersecurity field isn’t exempt from that. We can collectively make the industry stronger by examining barriers to entry and re-examining how we perceive the ideal cybersecurity candidate.”

By offering its programs globally, Udacity is able to help increase the diversity of the cybersecurity workforce so that it can better reflect the diverse backgrounds and different viewpoints held by hackers, be they benevolent or malicious, around the world. An (ISC)² stuy of diversity in the cybersecurity workforce revealed that while minority representation in the field sits at 26%, most hold non-managerial positions.

“As COVID-19 pushed more organizations to embrace remote work and digital work streams, vulnerability to breaches has grown materially, which in turn increased the demand for hiring hard-to-find cybersecurity professionals,” said Gabe Dalporto, CEO, Udacity. “The hands-on curriculum Udacity offers is critical in building job ready skills in the red-hot field of cybersecurity which has seen a 94% increase in job postings* in the past 5 years and has an average annual salary of $135,000.”