Building a Stable Cybersecurity Pipeline in Greater Fredericksburg

Germanna Community College, Greater Frederickburg

Vernon Green had a hiring problem. Eight years ago, the U.S. Army veteran founded GCubed, Inc., which provides IT and cybersecurity services. The company, based in Stafford County near Fredericksburg, soon ran into an obstacle: It had plenty of work, but not enough employees to handle the work.  

Partnering with his local community college, however, Green is creating a solution.

Germanna Community College has four campuses in the Fredericksburg area, including one in Stafford County. Vice President of Academic Affairs and Workforce Development Shashuna Gray embraces the opportunity to work with area businesses to target local career paths for her students.  

“It’s important for us to develop the talent in our communities,” Gray said. “Having business partner relationships, like the one that Germanna has with GCubed, is essential.”  

Starting two years ago with a grant from GO Virginia, a public-private initiative to foster business growth and job creation, Germanna and GCubed created a summer boot camp credentialing program for high school teachers. The idea was to train the teachers to teach cybersecurity classes. They’ve trained about 20 teachers so far, Gray said — but that number is always at risk of shrinking.  

“If we’re very honest with ourselves, if a teacher had the credentials and certifications that were required, they would have a hard time turning down the job offers” from cybersecurity companies, Green said — offers that usually come with higher wages. To fight that turnover, every teacher who completes the certification process must commit to teaching the program for at least one more year.

Now the college dean and the entrepreneur are launching the second phase of their program: allowing high school students to take Germanna courses for cybersecurity certifications. This spring, the first class of 30 high school students is expected to sit for certification examinations.  

“Some of them can go directly into the workplace, some of them will go to two-year institutions like Germanna, and some of them will go to four-year [colleges],” Gray said. “But what we are hoping to do is to create our own internal pipeline in this area, so people are not commuting” to jobs outside the community.

GCubed and Germanna are also partnering up this summer, as they have in past years, to offer free coding clubs and camps to area children. By reaching kids early, Gray said, that will hopefully set them up for future success.  

“If you can ignite a fire in a student in the fourth or fifth grade, and they understand that they need to begin taking Algebra 2 by the time they’re in the seventh grade, and that puts them on track to graduate with an advanced diploma, plus have some dual-enrollment experiences, it sets them in a better place to succeed in college” and in a cybersecurity career, she said.  

Green hopes that the partnership developed between GCubed and Germanna can be replicated by other businesses and educational institutions across the state. He said he’d like to see others “take this concept and reproduce it so that the kids, the teachers, and the community benefit from it.”  

The beauty of such cooperation, Gray said, is that it pushes both parties to do and achieve more. “When you have that partnership, you’re both willing to give a little more and invest a little more,” she said, “and try a lot harder to make sure that the community as a whole is successful, not just the individual.”