But Congress must get its act together and immediately implement this mandate in a bold, bipartisan, and purposeful way to strengthen technical and politicaldefense reorient America’s course in this dangerous global cybersecurity environment. I am currently helping a community college with a strong technical curriculum leading to an Associate of Applied Science in Cybersecurity to raise my profile to keep up with evolving technology, the marketplace, compliance, and the workplace. NOTE: If you are reading this post as a college administrator and do not have any form of content management, cybersecurity concentration, certificate, program or other qualification, you will not pass the proverbial finish line. Why did Biden issue the edict? Because our hyper-partisan, money-obsessed, self-serving, media-obsessed Congress strongly rejected the Obama administration’s attempt to put us in a better position, which President Biden thought was too serious a matter to risk immediate Congressional self-correction. Speaking of education, we still face a serious shortage of people qualified enough to fill the many cybersecurity vacancies in all sectors of American society. This week, President Biden signed an executive order advancing the nation’s cybersecurity efforts. I first learned about these statistics when I was dean of the cybersecurity certification program at UMass Amherst. At the time, I was developing a content assessment program at a small liberal arts college that did not have a computer science department. These changes, both psychological and physical, are critical to strengthening our government’s ability to manage this very complex issue, which depends as much, if not more, on diplomacy than it does on technology. Since I entered politics-inspired by the former president’s blatant failure to acknowledge the Russian threat to our elections-this two-position gap for any qualified candidate has become an even greater imbalance. Your country needs you to train people for jobs of national importance and for jobs where a suitably qualified student can find employment in this important field. This order is an important first step. It’s not just about computer science and programming or a technical certificate in Linux or Windows. Just ask Mark Zuckerberg, who has hired more than 50,000 content moderators in recent years, far more than the growth of software developers.