CSX Career Starter Program a Boon to Students

Today’s cybersecurity students face a number of challenges as they learn their field of choice. Two areas my students find particularly challenging include understanding the difference between information security and cybersecurity, and gaining context of a digitally altered world. They are also learning to analyze and understand the technological convergence and challenges around security, safety and control.

My cybersecurity students now have significantly more information to help them address those challenges. One of them is ISACA’s new Cybersecurity Fundamentals Career Starter program. Through the program, college and university instructors and students can receive free access to the Cybersecurity Fundamentals Study Guide, which I, and other professors, can use to shape our academic courses or as a reference to help build our students’ foundational cybersecurity knowledge.

Access to these cybersecurity educational materials can help my students to contextualize the challenges of security and control in a hyper-connected world where the flow of information is the enterprise standard. This formal cybersecurity material provides an important resource for my students and me. And because these educational resources are provided by an international organization with global recognition, it creates a key academic element that students and instructors can use for review and guidance in the field of cybersecurity.

The Career Starter program also gives students the opportunity to take Cybersecurity Nexus’ (CSX) Fundamentals Certificate exam. The online exam covers foundational cybersecurity knowledge across five key areas:

• Cybersecurity concepts
• Cybersecurity architecture principles
• Cybersecurity of networks, systems, applications and data
• Incident response
• Security implications of emerging technologies

A recent survey of ISACA student members found that a majority plan to work in a position that requires cybersecurity knowledge, yet most lack confidence that they will have sufficient knowledge upon graduation. I believe the Career Starter materials can help to fill that knowledge gap. The program’s reference documents will help anyone interested in exploring the different approaches to cyber risk. In that sense, this kind of educational resource can promote a critical revision in my students’ minds and an increased understanding of complex cybersecurity issues.

More information on the program can be obtained from local ISACA chapters. Contact information is available by clicking here.

Dr. Jeimy J. Cano M. is founder and member of GECTI (Universidad de los Andes, Law Faculty Research Group in Electronic Commerce, Telecommunications and Informatics). Since 1996, Cano has been a professor at Universidad de los Andes and many other Latin American universities in computer law, computer crime, digital forensic, information security governance and data privacy. Recently he was honored as a “Cybersecurity Educator of the Year 2016 – LATAM” by Cybersecurity Excellence Awards issued by Information Security Community in LinkedIn. He is an author of reference books in computer forensics and information security in Spanish:   Computación Forense. Descubriendo los rastros informáticos and Inseguridad de la información. Una visión estratégica, published by AlfaOmega Publishing.

[ISACA Now Blog]