Season 2 Episode 5 The KC7 Effect: Revolutionizing Cyber Education with Greg Schloemer

PODCAST Season 2  EPISODE 5  

Greg Schloemer

Threat Intelligence Analyst at Microsoft  
Vice-President/Co-Founder of KC7 Foundation

Quote of the Podcast – 

"Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn." - Benjamin Franklin

Introduction of Guest BIO – 

Greg is a threat intelligence analyst at Microsoft who focuses on tracking North Korean state-sponsored cyber threat actors. Greg also co-founded and is the Vice President of the KC7 Foundation, a cybersecurity education nonprofit whose mission is to empower a more diverse cybersecurity workforce. Greg is passionate about creating opportunities in cyber and tech for students in underserved communities, like those in Rural Appalachia.

Interview

Agents of Change: Leaders/Innovators

•  30,000 Ft. View – Why so we, as a society invest in education?
• What drew you to education side of training in Cyber?
• What do you love about what you do?
• KC7
• gamification in education
• making STEM education more accessible/approachable
• Tell us a story or favorite memory about your work in education
• What are the biggest challenges to you?
• What would you like decision makers to know?

Podcast/book shoutouts

I'll shout out to everyone to go play KC7 - even if you "aren't technical" or have no interest in cyber, you may surprise yourself with how fun it can be :)

Transcript

Liza Holland [00:00:02]:
Welcome to education perspectives. I am your host, Liza Holland. This is a podcast that explores the role of education in our society from a variety of lenses. Education needs to evolve to meet the needs of today and the future. Solving such huge issues requires understanding. Join me as we begin to explore the many perspectives of education. Well, we are welcoming today Greg Schollmer to Education Perspectives. Greg also cofounded and is vice president of the KC 7 Foundation, a cybersecurity education nonprofit whose mission is to empower a more diverse cybersecurity workforce.

Liza Holland [00:00:52]:
Greg is passionate about creating opportunities in cyber and tech for students that are in underserved communities like those in rural Appalachia. Welcome, Greg. We're so glad to have you here.

Greg Schloemer [00:01:03]:
Hey, Eliza. Thanks so much for having me. Super excited to be here.

Liza Holland [00:01:06]:
Well, I love what you're doing, and we'll get into that shortly. But I have to kick you off with our big question. So from a 30,000 foot view, why do you think that we, as a society, invest in education?

Greg Schloemer [00:01:18]:
I love this question. From my perspective, you know, I think education is really the foundation of, as a society, advance and and grow ourselves. Right? Education instills in us the ability to think critically, to solve problems, to navigate challenging social interactions. And on top of all that, you know, it it really helps us be more resilient. It gets us a little more comfortable with the idea of failing and, you know, the whole concept of of a productive struggle. But ultimately, I think all those things are what we have to have as a society to progress and move forward.

Liza Holland [00:01:54]:
Absolutely. And you are in a incredibly dynamic and new field of cybersecurity, or at least it's fairly new fields go. So tell us a little bit about your journey and then what drew you to the education side and, looking at getting in training and especially reaching out to students.

Greg Schloemer [00:02:14]:
Yeah. So my entry into the cybersecurity field was a little bit unconventional in terms of of how the the industry typically works for folks today. So I studied computer engineering at the University of Kentucky. I took 2 years of classes in that degree program that were mostly focused around programming. I had no cybersecurity coursework whatsoever until really the very end. I think it was the final semester of my senior year. So after the 2nd year of undergraduate at UK, I had the opportunity to go into an internship with Microsoft. And this was sort of this opportunity was presented to me as really just a general, you know, computer science programming type internship.

Greg Schloemer [00:02:58]:
And I showed up on day 1, you know, flew all the way out to Redmond, in Washington to live for the summer. And when I showed up to work on the 1st day, they said, you're gonna do cyber. And I said, that's awesome. Sounds cool. I don't know the first thing about it, but I'm excited to learn. And I really fell in love with the field. I found it challenging. I found it rewarding.

Greg Schloemer [00:03:17]:
It was sort of this unique opportunity to do something impactful, something that keeps me learning and keeps me on my toes, but also be in a position where, you know, working in tech, you're well compensated for that work. It's kinda like the trifecta of rewarding, challenging, and also well compensated. So I had 2 internships in cyber. And then following graduation from UK, I had the opportunity to return to Microsoft full time on the team that I'm on now. So to your question about, you know, what really drew me to the education side of cyber, I wanna go back and touch on that that cybersecurity course that I took at UK. And since my first experience with cyber was actually in the field, You know, it was quite literally hands on on the front lines of cybersecurity defense at one of the biggest tech companies in the world. And through that that job opportunity, I saw how much fun cybersecurity could be. I already mentioned, you know, it's this constant struggle of the attackers are always getting better, so therefore, you have to get better.

Greg Schloemer [00:04:26]:
And I love that. I love that I can't get complacent and I'm always having to learn. So that was my first taste of cyber. And then I see that there's a cybersecurity course that's being offered at my university. And I was like, Oh, great, you know, I love cyber. This is what I'm going to do for the rest of my career. Let me check this out. And the course was not what it did not match my experience in the field.

Greg Schloemer [00:04:48]:
Right? It wasn't fun. It wasn't exciting. It didn't give me that same sense of fulfillment and challenge that I found in the work. And so I sort of reflected on that and thought, you know, if for many people, a cybersecurity class is their first taste of the field. And if this is the experience, if this is what cyber looks like from the outside looking in for most people, No wonder we have a shortage of cyber workers. Right? This is lame. This is not at all reflective of what the work is actually like. And so I sort of took that as a challenge to go and and change that, to try to make cyber education and really STEM and tech education in general more reflective of the fun parts of what I had experienced in the field.

Liza Holland [00:05:34]:
That is awesome. And having seen you in action with students, I think you are really succeeding in that. It's very, very interesting to me. The more that I learn about you and what you're doing, the more fascinated I become. Would you share with our listeners how you and Simeon came upon this and especially about the week that Microsoft gives?

Greg Schloemer [00:05:56]:
Yeah. So kc7, that is the the cybersecurity education nonprofit. That's this whole venture of trying to gamify cybersecurity education and make it more reflective of how fun the field can be. I cofounded the nonprofit with Simeon Kakpovi, who is one of my teammates at Microsoft, and he approached me in the office one day. I work remotely, but I occasionally try to go into the office and, you know, mingle with people just to to have some of those side conversations and and maintain that camaraderie. So Simeon came over to me and said, hey. I have an idea. I've been working on this little side project, and my goal is to basically create an experience that lets anyone do what we do every day here at Microsoft.

Greg Schloemer [00:06:41]:
And there's some nuance to that. So part of what I do as a threat intelligence analyst is is analyze data. You know, in cyber defense, when we investigate cyber incidents, we have to see the world through data. I can't be sitting in the room with a hacker watching them hack. Right? So my only source of evidence is logs, is data. But that data is very, very sensitive. Right? There are privacy implications. We're talking about a global company that has 1,000,000,000 of users.

Greg Schloemer [00:07:08]:
And so I got to learn in that environment. Right? I got to learn in one of the richest, the most data rich environments in the world. But for the average person, you know, you can't go to Microsoft and say, hey, I wanna learn cybersecurity. Give me your data. There's no way. There you'd have several 100 lawyers beating down your door, ready to press charges against you. So Simeon said, you know, let's open source this. Let's bring it to the masses.

Greg Schloemer [00:07:34]:
And I was like, I love it, but that sounds crazy. How are we gonna do that? And he said, you know, I've I've sort of started on this already. I have some thoughts. And it it really blossomed from there. The week he mentioned at Microsoft. So every year, Microsoft has what they call the global hackathon, which is essentially where all the Microsoft employees around the world, I believe there are about 200,000 of us, are allowed to stop working, stop their day job work for a whole week, and create something. It can be something that directly pertains to your work at Microsoft, or it can be something totally off the wall. But it's a pretty amazing opportunity to, you know, get together with some brilliant minds and fellow coworkers at Microsoft and just make something new and exciting.

Greg Schloemer [00:08:22]:
So as I mentioned before, Simeon had sort of started this project several years before we met at Microsoft, but a lot of the initial work on the project happened during that hackathon week.

Liza Holland [00:08:33]:
That is just amazing. And I think that is such a so very few companies allow for that, give that time to actually create. And, honestly, I think it's an awesome thing to think about for schools because time is probably the most precious resource. And if we can create time to make learning more rich and involved in that sort of a thing, I just think that would be incredibly magical.

Greg Schloemer [00:09:00]:
Absolutely.

Liza Holland [00:09:00]:
So tell us a little bit more about what kc7 does today.

Greg Schloemer [00:09:05]:
Yeah. So kc7 is the 30,000 foot view of the platform is it's a cybersecurity game that gives anyone the opportunity to step into the role of a cyber defender. We back in March of 2023, we started the KC 7 Foundation, and the objective there was to get this platform, the KC 7 platform, into more hands. So to date, we've reached about 4,000 users in many, many different countries around the world. I don't have the the number of countries off the top of my head. We've reached students. We've worked with 4th graders all the way up through graduate students and PhD students. We've worked with professionals who are working in a different field and trying to transition into cyber.

Greg Schloemer [00:09:55]:
And we've actually even used the platform with industry professionals. We've worked with vice presidents at Microsoft who just wanted to know a little bit more about what it means to be a cybersecurity analyst.

Liza Holland [00:10:07]:
That's amazing. And you've then taken it kind of more into real world as far as approaching the students. It's not just the online game, which I think is amazing. And please check the show notes because we have the link and go in and play, share with your friends. But you've been doing some really innovative work with students where you actually have been doing it in a camp type of a situation and are thinking about classes. Can you talk a little bit more about what that looks like and how engaging it's been for students?

Greg Schloemer [00:10:38]:
Absolutely. The summer camp is one of my favorite things I've done probably in my entire life. I love talking about it. But the idea of the summer camp was so really before kc7 sort of blossomed as a platform, the way that we were getting users was going into classrooms. Right? From the very beginning, we realized I talked about my experience with cyber education. Simeon had a very similar experience in that, you know, he did not feel that that sense of satisfaction and excitement from his cybersecurity classes. So we knew from the very beginning that we wanted to bring this to students. And we started with Actually, during the hackathon week, Simeon said, We're gonna go to a college classroom on Wednesday and we're gonna run a session with a group of 30 business students.

Greg Schloemer [00:11:29]:
And I was like, You're crazy, but I love it. Let's do it. And so we did that, and it was great. They absolutely blew us away with what they were able to achieve. And then we said, well, let's push the boundaries a little further. Let's go work with some high school students. And we had peers in the industry who said, high schoolers can't do this. This is too hard.

Greg Schloemer [00:11:46]:
And then we did it with several groups of high schoolers. And, again, they absolutely blew us away. We actually had a session where we had to make everyone stop midday and go eat some pizza so we could make more questions because they blew through all the content we created. So we had these repeated successes and we said, okay, let's really challenge ourselves. Let's work with elementary students and middle school students. We had an opportunity to work with a school district to host a summer camp, where we had 35 4th through 7th graders come in and spend a week with us learning cybersecurity. And I really want to emphasize, when I say learning cybersecurity, you know, we could have showed up and brought, like, locks and taught them how to lockpick as an analogy to cyber. We could have brought little puzzles, and we could have had a movie day where they watched a a movie about cyber spies.

Greg Schloemer [00:12:45]:
But that was not the case at all. This was a a very education rich camp. It was essentially 5 days of cybersecurity boot camp or 4th through 7th graders. So our goal these kids had zero technical background whatsoever. Our goal was to have them, by day 5, investigating cybersecurity intrusions, attacks in data using real tools, real techniques, and then understanding that so well that they could actually brief us on what they found. But if you're listening to this and you think that sounds really hard, it is. It was a very ambitious goal, and that's exactly what we did. So we taught the students how to use data analysis tools that we actually use on the job, and they investigated a ransomware attack against a gaming company.

Greg Schloemer [00:13:35]:
And they did this really technical process that we call attribution where they not only found the attack, but then they said, here's who did it. Here's who's responsible, and here's why. And then they put all this information together and presented their findings to us after just 5 days. It was probably the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life. Never underestimate those students. Absolutely. Yeah. Can't emphasize that enough.

Liza Holland [00:14:03]:
I really enjoyed your story about having done the first one and that the students kinda blew you out of your content, and you're looking at, okay. This this isn't enough. We're just having them be one analyst is not going to make it work, and so how can we iterate and how can we continue to improve on this? And I just really appreciate that because so much of education, especially because we've got so much content to cover is, okay. Here you go. You got your lesson. It's done. You got a grade one way or another, and we're on to the next thing. And you being able to really take a look at that from a teaching perspective and make it more real and make it more engaging, I just was so incredibly impressed with that process.

Greg Schloemer [00:14:46]:
Thank you very much.

Liza Holland [00:14:47]:
Tell me a little bit about your thoughts on more gamification in education.

Greg Schloemer [00:14:53]:
Yeah. I think we sorta have an advantage in gamifying cyber because it is naturally a game, but it's inherently, without any modification, a game between attackers versus defenders. And so as we were creating k c 7, we really focused on capturing that and making that a core part of the experience. But I think as we think about applying gamification to other facets of education and other content areas, you know, the students of this generation are gaming everywhere. There are games in every digital platform that we interact with today. And so I think it's games are just a a natural environment in which students feel comfortable. It's an environment in which students feel okay with failing. Like, it's okay to struggle and fail in the context of a game.

Greg Schloemer [00:15:48]:
I think that's kind of a universal experience. But then suddenly, we move to the classroom and, you know, it's not okay to get a c on that test. It's not okay to get proficient or distinguished on your end of year assessment. So we think about, like, how students learn so much more in the context of a game. I think that's partially because there's so much more flexibility. The expectations are lower. It's it's all about getting to the end, beating the game, meeting the objective, and it doesn't matter how you get there or how long it takes.

Liza Holland [00:16:19]:
I love that, and I love that productive struggle part of it that it's okay to fail and to try a new strategy and to get a little bit better. And I had a wonderful conversation a few weeks ago with a gentleman from MIT, and his whole book is called Iterate. And it was all about that every time you do something, you can make it a little bit better and you could finesse. And, realistically, those are the characteristics that we want kids to be able to grasp onto and take into the workplace with them. You know, you just said in your introduction that you are learning all the time because the other people keep getting better, and so you have to keep getting better. And I love that piece of making lifelong learners through games, through play, through enjoyment, all that kind of good stuff. Know, and I think STEM education is an area that's really ripe for this. What are your thoughts about making it a little bit more accessible and approachable?

Greg Schloemer [00:17:12]:
I think one thing that really plagued STEM education is this idea that students, often at a very young age, sort of self identify as capable or not capable in STEM content areas, right? Like, I'm a math person or I'm not a math person. I'm a science person or I'm not a science person. People tell us when we go through these KC7 exercises, like, Oh, I'm not a technical person. And I always say, what does that mean? Right? What does a technical person look like? What does a technical person do? I'm a firm believer that that's all nonsense And that a lot of the the sort of early self efficacy assessments that students make in these STEM fields is based largely on the way that we teach it. Right? It's based largely on a bad experience in learning math or science at a very young age. And again, going back to this idea of iterating and productive struggle, you know, I don't think we do a good enough job instilling in students that STEM fields are hard. It's okay if you don't get it right away, but that doesn't mean you're not a math person or you're not technical person. So, that's something that in kc7, we've really tried to break down.

Greg Schloemer [00:18:29]:
One of our core philosophies is we want you to be successful playing KC7 so quickly that you actually don't have time to give up on yourself. Right? So in the very first minutes, you're experiencing success, you're getting that hit of of satisfaction, and that's enough to pull you in and motivate you to approach the next challenge. And it's been really, really successful. We've had a lot of people who have either just stumbled on our platform or who we've directly recruited to give our platform a try. These people otherwise wouldn't be looking for something like this, like they aren't pursuing a career in cyber, but they've given KC7 a try, and we've consistently gotten feedback that worked for them. That at first, they didn't think they could do it, but they started doing it. And then it was like, oh, wait, I'm are you know, I'm already in it. I can't.

Greg Schloemer [00:19:24]:
It's too late to say I can't do this because I already have.

Liza Holland [00:19:27]:
You know, I so agree with you about how we get to label ourselves as good at or not good at, at that very early age. And I think that especially where it comes to tech and to areas like cyber, even that self selection out there where I was kind of self selected as more of a social studies English person. I love to write stories. I love to read history. I love to do all of those types of things and investigate. But in observing the camp, there were things that were incredibly attractive to someone like me as well. There was that how you can tell a story through data and how you can be an investigator and look at a variety of resources and be able to come to an assessment, a probability that this person was responsible for the crime. And those are not necessarily STEM attributes, but they so have a place here.

Greg Schloemer [00:20:25]:
Absolutely. I'm so glad you said that and happy to hear that was your experience seeing the camp. You know, there there are so many facets of cybersecurity that are so cross disciplinary, and that's really been the core of what we've tried to develop in our content at kc7. So like you said, investigative thinking, that's a huge part of cyber, but it's also a huge part of so many other fields, both in industry and in the classroom. Critical thinking, can you consider a source of information, make critical assessments about the validity of that information, and then compare other sources to reach your own conclusion. I do that every single day in the field, but yet that skill set is so, so valuable in so many other, facets of life. So I think there are a lot of those sorts of opportunities across many different content areas. Right? I think we've done a good job in developing k c 7, sort of highlighting those cross disciplinary skills, those transferable skills.

Greg Schloemer [00:21:28]:
But, frankly, I think we can do a better job of that in the classroom in helping students understand that, you know, math really is just one application of critical thinking, and science is another, and history is a different one. Right? Life is full of these interwoven webs of skills and abilities. And I think that's something that, you know, the sooner we realize that, the more willing we are to try new things and learn new things.

Liza Holland [00:21:56]:
Oh, I agree with you so much. And I think that, again, we have to be thinking about the fact that particularly the kids that are in school now. I mean, we're preparing them for jobs that don't even exist yet. And it's just the breadth and depth of what is available, and you don't have to niche so hard that you're only into one thing. So many people that I know now have been in a variety of different industries and and explored their talents, those transferable skills in in multiple different areas. So but, obviously, there is a huge need in cyber. Tell us about the job market and the potential there.

Greg Schloemer [00:22:30]:
Yeah. So if we look at at cybersecurity and the impact that cyberattacks have on the world. So if you stack up the total cost of damage done by cyberattacks against some of the world's largest economies, Damage done by cyberattacks is in the top 5, stacked up against some of the world's largest economies. So, clearly, there's a huge need for more people who are capable of detecting and combating these cyber attacks. I don't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but there's on the order of 2,000,000 expected cybersecurity roles that will be unfilled in 2025, which is people have been saying this statistic for 3 or 4 years, and here it is. It's 2024. So we've got, you know, 2,000,000 seats we need to fill here in less than a year. So governments and educational institutions put a lot of focus into what they call the cyber skills gap, which sort of implies that it's a lack of ability or a lack of training, but what we've experienced and what I feel very strongly in is that it's really more of an access issue.

Greg Schloemer [00:23:46]:
It's really more of the fact that students don't really know what cyber looks like. I think you hear cyber security and you immediately think, you know, code. You think a dude in his mom's basement wearing a hoodie. Right? You often don't think of what cyber really looks like, how fun it can be, how globally impactful some of these nation state cyber attacks can be, and how as you said before, you know, how social studies and geopolitics plays a huge part in that. One sort of anecdote to support this, when we ran one of our high school events, we gave the students a pre and a post survey. And in both we asked the same set of questions for both surveys. But in the pre survey results, it was about 40% of students who said that they were at least somewhat interested in cybersecurity. And after 6 hours of kc7, which was very hands on, very immersive, and reflective of the real experience, when we asked them again at the end of the day, it was about 90% of students who said that they were somewhat interested in cyber and who would actually take a cybersecurity course if it were offered at their school.

Liza Holland [00:24:55]:
That is a huge impact.

Greg Schloemer [00:24:57]:
Yeah. It's a huge impact. It's a drastic change. Yeah. Right? So if if we're saying there's a skills shortage, a skills gap, and we're trying to fill these 2,000,000 roles, you know, let's instead think about the fact that half of students maybe are immediately excluding themselves from pursuing the field further. Right? So if we could fix that first, let's get more interest. Let's get more students hands on in the field, understanding what it looks like. If now we have 90% or even 70% of the pool, somewhat interested in pursuing it further, I think we're gonna have a much more successful time tackling this massive shortage.

Liza Holland [00:25:36]:
Well, that's a serious call to action for our, education groups to come up with, some good, exciting types of curriculum, both at at, like, the k through 12 level and also in higher education because, obviously, your experience was not exactly exhilarating, the one class that you took, and we can definitely do better there. And I think that partnership with folks that are actually out in the field doing it is a lot of the power of what I see you doing with kc7. So exciting.

Greg Schloemer [00:26:06]:
It's a really exciting thing to be part of. It's a great little, side project.

Liza Holland [00:26:11]:
So what do you see as, and that might be a little bit of a prescient thing on my part, but what do you see as the biggest challenges to being able to fill that gap, to being able to make those changes in education, etcetera?

Greg Schloemer [00:26:23]:
Yeah. I think there are a number of things. One challenge is the perception. And I don't know this may be my industry bias coming into play here. But I mentioned earlier when we talked about this idea of having college students, high school students, elementary students doing cybersecurity with the real tools. The immediate reaction was, that's too hard. Yeah. And I think we've gotta stop that.

Greg Schloemer [00:26:49]:
We cannot dumb down experiences in the classroom. You know, I'm at Microsoft. It's they're some of the brightest minds in the world at my company. And I can honestly say I've worked with some high school students through KC7 that impressed me more than my coworkers. So it's not a matter, it's not that there's a lack of capability, right? We can't say it's not possible before we even try. So I think that's one thing we need to fix. The other thing that I would like to try to see us address, you know, I'm not a trained educator. I don't have a degree in education.

Greg Schloemer [00:27:24]:
I don't have a teaching license. And I actually had the opportunity to work pretty closely and essentially teach or co teach a computer science class at a school district. And there were a lot of barriers to making that possible. I know here in Kentucky, there are programs that allow professionals to get a teaching certification. But there are weird sort of archaic requirements around that. Like, you need to have 5 years of experience and, like, you have to prove that there's not a valid alternative teaching pathway. I don't remember all the specifics, but it's very hard to do. Right? And I think I'm not saying at all that I could replace an educator.

Greg Schloemer [00:28:04]:
I think there's a mutual exchange of value that we can create when an industry professional works with a trained educator to design innovative learning experiences. Right? But I don't see any point in putting up artificial barriers to keep someone like me, who knows the content and who's passionate about bringing it to students. Let's not keep those people out. Right? Let's find more ways to bring them in, and let's find more ways to empower them to have an impact with students.

Liza Holland [00:28:35]:
That is, like, the perfect answer to my final question about what do you want decision makers to know. I mean, jeez. That is it's so powerful. And I think that that's the magic sauce, right, is that we need to find a way for us to be able to get business and industry and education closer to where the content that they're teaching is relevant. It's timely. It's exciting, and it actually matches the needs for students that are graduating and moving on. That's just awesome. You have given me so many quotable quotes today.

Greg Schloemer [00:29:10]:
Well, I love your summary of of what I said there. I think you you captured it perfect.

Liza Holland [00:29:14]:
So maybe for you, I would like to finish then with a call to potential students. It doesn't have to be young students. It could be even career changing types of students. If you were interested in cyber, obviously, step 1 is to go on to kc7 cyber and, play the game. But what else would you suggest?

Greg Schloemer [00:29:37]:
Yeah. Well, I'm gonna answer your question. But before I do, I'm gonna back up a little bit. So I wanna encourage everyone, if you're listening to this podcast and you're an educator and you have zero interest in cybersecurity whatsoever, Please go try the game. I promise you, it is fun, and you will enjoy the experience. And while you're enjoying the experience, you might accidentally learn a thing or 2 about cybersecurity. This is a huge part of our approach. Right? It goes back to the discussion we had earlier.

Greg Schloemer [00:30:08]:
Do not self limit your abilities and your interests. If you've never done anything like this, how do you know that you don't wanna be a cybersecurity professional? Right? Maybe you'll have a a career change from trying our platform. So I just wanna put that out there. Please go try it. Whether you think it's something you'd be interested in or not, try it. If you're a teacher and you try it, it might help you better understand and be able to bring it to your students. To your question though about for folks who want to get into the field, what's next after kc7? And I love you took the words out of my mouth and put that as step 1. I think really the key is to start that lifelong learning journey on your own.

Greg Schloemer [00:30:50]:
I can say as someone who has interviewed candidates for cybersecurity positions at Microsoft, that's one of the things that we are most interested in in seeing in a candidate. Are you someone who has a passion for this, who has that ability to take initiative and go learn things? There are lots of things that are always changing in our field. You cannot possibly know everything. So we need to see successful people in our field need to have the ability to go out and to learn things and to ask good questions. So I would say, you know, step 2 is really, if you encounter something in KC7 and you don't fully understand what it is or what it means, go learn about it. You know, if you interact with IP addresses in KC 7 and you don't really understand what an IP address is, go do some research. How do they work? How are they generated? What do they mean? Similarly, if you're reading a cybersecurity article in the news, there's plenty of resources out there for you to go and learn more about all those things. So you kinda get, like, you get the news high level summary of the incident.

Greg Schloemer [00:31:51]:
Right? But if you really want to know the details, that stuff's out there. More often than not, there are those technical details available out in the open. So yeah, just be curious, ask good questions. All the people that I've worked with in this industry really want to bring more people in, and they really want to see people be successful in our field. So if you find yourself, you know, really interested and and excited about cyber, start networking with people. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. You can connect with people I'm connected to on LinkedIn. Send us a message, ask a question, just say hi.

Greg Schloemer [00:32:25]:
It's those are all great ways to connect with people, and connecting with people can always lead to more opportunity.

Liza Holland [00:32:32]:
Absolutely. An awesome answer to the question. Thank you, Greg, for spending time with me and exploring this and for infusing a bit of of fun along with the amazing skills and resources, you know, into learning about cybersecurity.

Greg Schloemer [00:32:45]:
Thanks so much, Liza, for having me. It's it's been a great conversation. I've really enjoyed it. Awesome.

Liza Holland [00:32:52]:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Education Perspectives. Feel free to share your thoughts on our Facebook page. Let us know which education perspectives you would like to hear or share. Please subscribe and share with your friends.