---
title: "Cyber-Ready Community Series: Introduction"
description: Tony Bryan explores what's holding back cybersecurity talent and how employers, educators, and communities can build a stronger workforce together.
image: https://news.wecyberup.org/hubfs/1-Oct-28-2026-07-39-33-6959-PM.png
---

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# Cyber-Ready Community Series: Introduction

[Tony Bryan](https://news.wecyberup.org/cy-says-blog/author/tony-bryan)

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![](https://news.wecyberup.org/hubfs/1-Oct-28-2026-07-39-33-6959-PM.png)

### **Our Future Cyber Talent Pipeline is in Serious Trouble**

Before I dive into the data, I think it is worth sharing why this hits so close to home for me.

If you know the team at CyberUp or me, you know we live and breathe this work from our home base in St. Louis. Eight years ago, we launched the third Cybersecurity Analyst Registered Apprenticeship program in the country. Since then, we have had a front-row seat to the whole machine. We see the educators building the curriculum, the companies doing the hiring, and the public and private funders cutting the checks. It has been a wild roller coaster, but I am incredibly proud of what our alumni have achieved.

Recently, I spent a few days in Philadelphia at the NICE Conference. I look forward to it every year because it is really the operational heartbeat of cyber education in the United States. It is a room full of the most passionate minds you will ever meet, and everyone is grinding away to build a talent pipeline for our field.

### Bridging But this year, something felt off.

Looking at the numbers and listening to colleagues, I kept coming back to one glaring conclusion. Our future cyber talent pipeline is in serious trouble.

Over the years, the industry told us candidates needed better critical thinking, stronger digital literacy, and deep hands-on skills. The ecosystem stepped up beautifully. We saw massive investments in training, the rise of great capture-the-flag events like the National Cyber League, innovative training labs like the AZ Cyber Initiative, and fully functioning campus Security Operations Centers at schools like Maryville University. Everyone was trying to make sure students were ready on day one.

Most of this was guided by industry pros volunteering on college advisory groups or nonprofit boards. That input is valuable, but it also creates a massive blind spot.

Security pros tend to define what it means to be job-ready through the lens of their own career path, their own company, and their own current tech stack. One employer wants Security Operations Center experience, another wants compliance, and the next person wants cloud, artificial intelligence, or incident response. Nobody is wrong, but together, it creates a totally fragmented picture of what the market actually expects.

That fragmentation makes it almost impossible for educators and training providers to build clear, scalable pathways. The issues are too big to dump into a single post, so I am breaking this down into a four-part series. We need to step back, look at the machinery of how we train and hire, and fix the cracks before the pipeline runs dry.

### Here is where we are going over the next four weeks.

1. **The Echo Chamber** Training providers are constantly forced to guess what companies actually need. We are building incredible labs, but we are often doing it based on a game of telephone. Educators and candidates are left guessing which skills will actually get them a job.
2. **The Supply Gap** We are about to hit a massive talent crunch. A drop in consumer confidence is already causing computer science enrollments to slide nationwide. When you combine that with a looming overhaul in government funding models, the entry-level talent pool is about to shrink fast.
3. **The Last Mile** There are hundreds of thousands of capable people sitting on the sidelines right now trying to break into cyber. We do not have a supply problem, we have a completion problem. We do not need more multi-year academic tracks. We need to invest in the last mile, which means the specific, employer-aligned skills that move someone from trained to hired.
4. **The Ecosystem Blueprint** We have to say the quiet part out loud and confront our internal hiring biases. We have thousands of capable people looking for work, and a massive market of small businesses that desperately need cyber readiness. I will lay out a concrete blueprint to connect these dots, challenge broken human resources filters, and move past passive advisory boards.

### Let's Fix the Machine

The candidates standing on the sidelines have already proven their grit. They have done the heavy lifting, changed their life trajectories, and mastered the technical fundamentals. They are standing at the 10-yard line, ready to go.

It is time to stop treating the skills gap like some unsolvable mystery. We need to look honestly at where the system is breaking down, because fixing it requires all of us. We need companies ready to hire differently, funders willing to anchor the community defense, and practitioners dedicated to mentoring the next generation.

This is just the beginning. Continue reading **[Part 1: The Broken Handoff: When “Job-Ready” Gets Lost in Translation](https://news.wecyberup.org/cy-says-blog/cyber-ready-community-part-1-broken-handoff)**, where we explore the disconnect between cybersecurity training and hiring.

Ready to take an active role in building a cyber-ready community? Explore CyberUp's pathways for employers, funders, and volunteers.

[**Get Involved with CyberUp**](https://cta-service-cms2.hubspot.com/web-interactives/public/v1/track/click?encryptedPayload=AVxigLLhfiEdwyM6nSkQlqm4HLoua%2BVAjc106K7jGW0ftS05VPzg12zlMDmAtiUBGr2SDrE75E%2FVf3yzTyY2z33VIiJRI%2FpEUNu04AJZ7JfnooKJYZ%2Bchaq5%2FQewibUL3gbdCTBL6sr4AB6HqZug4QkkGNzKjZMcbRj1YuJweaEnhsdBPM9X8O%2BOUX9JAqGjtiCJVT4%2B1gDh1DSUCetQsLbR3fK3SQ%3D%3D&portalId=21596173)

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