CYBR.SEC.Careers with Sheridan Skurupey-McDonald & James “JB” Bryant

And that brings up a good segue, right? So maybe, Michael, you can start in on this for everybody is the whole background, because we've been kind of chasing this one for a while as part of our whole efforts around formerly Hughes SITCON, now CyberSITCON and where the roots are.

So tell everybody more about what CyberSIT careers is about and community, et cetera.

Yeah, thanks, Sam.

Definitely important to give the background here.

So way back in 2010, when we started HusekCon, it was a nonprofit originally, and it was connected with a nonprofit that was a 501c6, and then we moved into being a 501c3 by ourselves.

And that was a big thing for us, is just trying to give back to the community and letting people see that this is not a whole thing of us trying to enrich ourselves or anything.

We really wanted to make this about the community.

But as we moved in and created CyberSec Community, we wanted to make sure we kept that nonprofit side of the house.

So we changed the name of HughesSecCon to CyberSec Careers and then created or changed the mission basically from running events to to workforce development in cybersecurity.

And that was a really big focus for us always anyway, is to educate people and to help them learn about cybersecurity and get into the field.

But an interesting part that happened right before we made that move was that we connected up with Dan Broussard and he had a scholarship that was a memorial scholarship for his son, Taylor Austin Broussard.

That's what TAB stands for, if people are familiar with that And his son had passed away in a car crash, obviously very tragically, but he was trying to get into cybersecurity when that happened.

So Dan and Sheridan and Lauren and I all worked together at Set Solutions.

He was like, well, you guys already have...

this nonprofit 501c3 put together? Why don't we just kind of combine forces? So we started working with Dan, partnered with Dan, and that's been, I don't know, that's probably been four years.

If not, I can't remember the exact timeline, but it's been a while since we did that.

And that was kind of the big move for us to really start focusing on trying to help young people and veterans and students and everybody else who wanted to get into, into cybersecurity and learn about it.

Those two things kind of combined gave us our start to getting it all together, but then We did a lot of other stuff last year, and I don't want to steal Sheridan's thunder on here because I want her to talk about this.

But it all led up to us going, well, if we're going to put this much effort and time into trying to help people and really focus on the community and that nonprofit side, we can't do this with the existing crew that we had.

There was too much going on.

So that's when... boom, we said, hey, let's keep focusing on this and let's get Sheridan to come in and actually organize this dang thing because she knew what she was doing.

And by the way, I think you've completed your degree, right? So she officially has a master's.

Congratulations, by the way.

I got to be on some interviews and stuff.

She did a great job doing presentations and stuff.