Cyber Hero Steve Linthicum Advances Community Colleges’ Role in Cybersecurity Education
SynED’s series highlighting cyber heroes who quietly go above and beyond in helping to secure our nation and communities
Community colleges play a unique role in filling the thousands of open cybersecurity positions across California, and Steve Linthicum is at the forefront of helping students create the pathways that will lead to stable, well-paying jobs.HR Technology News: Employee Burnout Can Be Fatal – for Employees and Companies Alike
Linthicum is the Regional Director for Industry Engagement in Orange County for the Information Communications Technologies/Digital Media (ICT-DM) sector of California Community Colleges. In that role, he brings partners from education and industry together to meet critical workforce needs, like the one that exists in cybersecurity.
Before his current role, Linthicum spent nearly 20 years as an instructor at Sierra College in Rocklin, where he saw firsthand the valuable role that community colleges play in meeting ever-changing workforce demand.
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“Because we have the ability to modify our courses quickly, not being constricted by the curriculum modification process 4-year colleges and universities face, we can teach what we need to be teaching in this rapid evolution of technologies,” Linthicum said.
Linthicum began incorporating cybersecurity into his courses in the late 1990s, with a focus on Microsoft Windows and Novell Netware security. Back then, he says, privacy and security were largely ignored because computers were not networked.
The addition of virtual machines in the years since has made teaching complex networking and other activities much easier.
“Teaching hands-on labs required the use of physical equipment rather than virtual machines, making it difficult to experience complex networking scenarios,” Linthicum said. “With virtualization, all we are limited to is our imagination when creating labs.”
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