Sustainable, Hands-on and Multi-disciplinary Cybersecurity Skills Training to Meet Workforce Needs of Critical Infrastructure Sectors in Florida
A Report of Project Progress by Cyber Florida at USF
In Spring 2024, Cyber Florida was awarded a two-year, $200,000 grant from National Institute of Standards and Technology for their project – “Sustainable, Hands-on and Multi-disciplinary Cybersecurity Skills Training to Meet Workforce Needs of Critical Infrastructure Sectors in Florida” as part of their Regional Alliances and Multistakeholder Partnerships to Stimulate (RAMPS) Cybersecurity Education and Workforce Development (RAMPS Program).
The overall goals of the project are a) solicit core cybersecurity workforce needs both within and across various critical infrastructure (CI) sectors in Florida; b) analyze and summarize findings across entry level workforce needs; c) design a semester-level and practical/ hands-on cybersecurity training program for students that is to meet entry-level CI workforce needs; d) connect the first cohort of trained students to critical infrastructure sectors via interns and full-time positions; e) evaluate outcomes across multiple metrics including student self-assessment, industry expert assessment, program sustainability and scalability across institutions and CI sectors in FL.
Based on survey responses, we identified tangible gaps in entry level workforce needs across CI sectors in Florida in a broad sense, and started designing a 14 weeks hands on training program for students. The program was also designed keeping in mind the components of the Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity (NICE Framework) published on March 5, 2024 by NIST. The framework is publicly available at and contains Task, Knowledge, and Skill (TKS) Statements; Work Role Categories and Work Roles; and Competency Areas in the realm of cybersecurity workforce. The framework is available at https://www.nist.gov/itl/applied-cybersecurity/nice/nice-framework-resource-center.
We recruited our first cohort of five students for this semester-level program from the newly formed Bellini College of AI, Cybersecurity and Computing (CAICC) at the University of South Florida in January 2025. The five students went through our 14 week program centered on three foundational pillars – a) Basic Security Blue Team Level 1 (BTL1) Training for one month; b) Industrial Control Systems Foundational Course via the Aligned Realistic Cyberattack Simulation (ARCS) platform offered by SimSpace for one month; and c) ICS/SCADA Security Essentials course offered by the SANS institute. Students are eligible for a BTL1 certificate, and a Global Industrial Cyber Security Professional Certification (GICSP) in Industrial Control Systems upon completing a) and c). In addition, throughout the program, students are exposed to backdoors and breaches exercises, participate in mock security operations center (SOC) intelligence briefs, and also read state of the art research papers and trends in cyber centered critical infrastructure protection.
Multiple critical infrastructure entities in Florida participated in student engagement activities in Spring 2025. These include Tampa Airport, Tampa General Hospital, Talquin Coop and Seminole Electric. We have our next cohort of students starting in Fall 2025, and you are welcome to engage with Cyber Florida/ our students in the program. Post training, we expect our students to meet internship and entry-level workforce requirements in cybersecurity for critical infrastructure sectors in Florida.
