Rethinking Statewide Cybersecurity Workforce Development
Breaking Free of Legacy Ruts
Traditional education pathways often follow the same grooves--states invest in universities, universities attract students, and the best graduates launch into careers and hopefully local. For decades, this was enough to build local economies, especially in trades and manufacturing. Factories are physical; you couldn’t take the job with you. If a state built a plant, it also built a workforce. Talent stayed because the work was tied to place.
But knowledge work breaks that formula. A cybersecurity analyst, data scientist, or software developer doesn’t need to live near the “factory.” Their skills travel, and so do they. That’s why states still chase manufacturing plants and trade programs - because training welders, machinists, or plant operators often guarantees that talent remains local. In contrast, training knowledge workers without a strategy to keep them rooted risks turning them into the state’s #1 export.
Most states rely on higher education institutions to solve the cyber workforce problem, hoping graduates stay in state. But what if the issue is more deeply rooted? What if higher ed alone isn’t enough? What if the real answer is a team approach, blending schools, communities, technical centers, afterschool programs, and higher education into a unified talent pipeline?
That’s exactly what Vermont is testing with the Cyber Start Program. It’s a case study in how states can think differently about workforce development.
Vermont’s Challenge: Shared by Many States
Vermont faces a unique mix of challenges:
- Geographic dispersion: Students are spread thin across rural towns.
- Socioeconomic barriers: Program fees, travel, and limited access to enrichment lock out students from low-income families.
- Retention struggles: Young people who get technical training often leave the state for larger job markets.
Yet Vermont’s challenge is not unique. Many states face the same workforce issues. Rural states, mid-sized states, even some urban states—all are losing trained talent faster than they can replace it.
The Cyber Start Program was designed to turn that narrative around.
The Vermont Cyber Start Program
At its core, the program is a distributed cybersecurity talent pipeline designed to meet students where they live, level the playing field, and tie education directly to workforce opportunity.
- Cyber exposure at scale: Students statewide access an online gamified platform, learning real cyber skills through challenges like forensic analysis and password cracking.
- Equity by design: Free participation removes cost barriers. Access is uniform whether you live in Burlington or a town of 900 near the Canadian border.
- Pathways beyond high school: Top performers are encouraged to continue—into Champlain College, into other colleges, or through non-traditional education like certificate programs, industry credentials, or apprenticeships.
- Community as a stakeholder: By aligning technical centers, afterschool programs, and schools to a common mission, Cyber Start makes talent development a community goal, not just a student goal. Communities celebrate success stories as their own.
- Portable credentials: Students who complete the program earn a foundational certification that can transfer to participating colleges, technical centers, or employers. It’s not just a badge; it’s a passport into further opportunity.
Why This Matters: Workforce Development as State Security
Cybersecurity is workforce security. Programs like Cyber Start are more than education initiatives; they’re economic strategies.
Consider this: economists often cite the 50-20-30 budgeting rule for households (50% for needs, 20% savings, 30% discretionary spending). When a new cybersecurity graduate earns a $70,000 salary and stays local, that’s $35,000 per year pumped directly into rent, mortgages, and groceries; $14,000 saved or invested locally; and $21,000 spent on discretionary items that support local businesses.
Now add the job multiplier effect. Research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that every one high-tech job creates roughly two additional non-tech jobs in the economy. So, one cybersecurity hire doesn’t just fill a SOC seat, it creates a ripple effect: a barista, a mechanic, a childcare worker, a homebuilder.
Using our $70,000 salary example, if Vermont retains 100 Cyber Start graduates in-state over a five-year span, that’s $35M in direct wages circulating in the economy and an estimated 200 additional jobs created indirectly. For a small state, those numbers matter. For larger states, they scale even higher.
Workforce development isn’t abstract. States are economically stabilized by tax revenue and to do this means payroll needs to stay local.
Early Outcomes and Signals of Success
While still in its early stages, Cyber Start has already shown encouraging results. The signals are promising:
- Students in rural communities who previously lacked access are now scoring high on national challenges.
- Diversity of participation is increasing, particularly among students from lower-income families and first-generation college households.
- Pathway continuity is visible, with graduates entering Champlain College’s cyber program and other local higher education programs.
- Community engagement is strengthening as schools and parents rally around the program’s mission.
Narratively, what this looks like is powerful: students in small towns discovering cybersecurity, entire communities cheering them on, and those students turning into local professionals who stay to defend their state. The first wave of graduates is beginning to validate the model.
The Chess Move: Scaling This Model Nationwide
If it works in Vermont, it can work anywhere. The Cyber Start approach is portable and adaptable. States should consider:
- Partnering with higher ed or local anchors: Find institutions or organizations to anchor the academic and technical backbone.
- Partnering with industry: Create internship pipelines, mentorship programs, and scholarships that connect Cyber Start graduates directly to employers.
- Securing state backing: Endorsement and funding signal that this is a statewide mission, not just an extracurricular.
- Creating pathways to credentials: Ensure foundational certifications transfer into colleges, apprenticeships, or entry-level jobs.
- Measuring impact: Track retention, diversity, and workforce integration, then market success stories publicly.
The key isn’t replicating Vermont’s exact setup. It’s adopting the principle of distributed, inclusive, team-based workforce development.
A Progressive Model: Why This Matters for Government Leaders
State CIOs, CISOs, and agency heads need to see this clearly: Student SOCs help their universities, but they’re the software patch, not the system upgrade required to truly fix the workforce gap. While student security operations centers offer great experiential learning, they don’t fix the foundational workforce pipeline problem. They can’t guarantee equitable access, long-term retention, or economic multipliers.
Cyber Start and models like it do. They attack the problem at the root—before higher education, before career migration—building a broad and diverse base of local talent. For public-sector leaders, this is about self-reliance. Every state that builds its own cyber workforce base reduces dependency on external markets, contractors, and federal stopgaps.
In an era where cyber threats are relentless, the real progressive move isn’t just better firewalls or detection tools. It’s cultivating the people who will manage them, defend them, and innovate beyond them.
The Model
The Vermont Cyber Start Program is more than a student initiative. It’s a progressive model for workforce development, one that breaks down geographic and socioeconomic hurdles and turns entire communities into stakeholders.
For states looking to solve the cybersecurity workforce crisis, the lesson is clear: don’t leave it solely to universities, and don’t wait until students are already packing their bags for jobs elsewhere. Build early pipelines, root them in community, and watch the benefits multiply—not just in jobs, but in resilience, security, and economic growth.
Vermont may be small, but it just gave the nation a big idea: Cyber Start. A team approach to growing, keeping, and empowering the cyber defenders of tomorrow.
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