NIST to help retrain NASA employees as cyber specialists
September 10, 2010
| 5:21 PM
The top cybersecurity educator at the National Institute of Standards and Technology is helping a public-private consortium to open a research institute that would retrain NASA contractors who will be laid off from the shuttle program as early as next month, NextGov reports.
Nearly 9,000 employees representing a total income of $600 million could be displaced by the termination of the space shuttle program next year, particularly along the space coast, a 72-mile-long area in east-central Florida where the Kennedy Space Center is located. United Space Alliance expects to layoff on Oct. 1 between 800 and 1,000 employees in its Florida-based shuttle workforce, company officials announced in July. Layoffs already have begun elsewhere in the country, and more are expected as the shuttle is retired in 2011, NASA spokesman Michael Curie said on Friday. But NASA is not reducing its workforce.
The Obama administration has committed $40 million to help the unemployed in Florida transfer their skills to other fields, including information technology and national security. On Sept. 1, the Commerce Department began a competition for $35 million in grants to fund projects that align the talents of affected workers with the economic needs of the region. One example of an initiative that might qualify for funding is the Global Institute for Cybersecurity and Research headquartered near the Kennedy Space Center, said Ernest McDuffie, lead for NIST's National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education.
"They're going to take this workforce that's getting ready to be laid off, fired, and retrain them to keep them employed," McDuffie said. "They really need to have something up and running within three to six months."
Quickly cultivating new cybersecurity specialists also is critical for the government. Current shortages of qualified information assurance staff have weakened agencies' defenses against cyberattacks, according to federal officials. The CIA has estimated that about 1,000 security experts in the nation possess the skills to safeguard cyberspace, but the country needs about 30,000.
Read more here.
Categories:
Cybersecurity
Join the Discussion
The National Journal Group has the right (but not the obligation) to monitor the comments and to remove any materials it deems inappropriate.
Comments powered by Disqus