Kyle Kuhlers, a computer programming and cybersecurity instructor at Hawkeye Community College and Waterloo Career Center, discusses his journey into cybersecurity education and the key goals and approaches of his web programming and cybersecurity programs.
A summary of the episode
Kuhlers emphasizes the importance of hands-on learning, community engagement, and practical skill development to prepare students for real-world cybersecurity challenges. He highlights the value of certifications, networking, and extracurricular activities in building students’ confidence and competitiveness in the field.
Kuhlers also shares advice for aspiring cybersecurity students, encouraging them to stay curious, get involved in the local community, and leverage resources like LinkedIn, TryHackMe, and mentorship opportunities.
Listen to the episode
A full transcript of the interview
Steve Bowcut:
Thank you for joining us today for the Cybersecurity Guide podcast. My name is Steve Bowcut. I am a writer and an editor for Cybersecurity Guide and the podcast’s host. We appreciate your listening today.
Our guest is Kyle Kuhlers web programming and cybersecurity instructor at Hawkeye Community College and Waterloo Career Center. The topic for today is Building Cyber skills for the future. Let me tell you a little bit about Kyle before we bring him in.
Kyle Kuhlers, as I said, as a computer programming, cybersecurity and gaming instructor at Waterloo Career Center in Hawkeye Community College, where he also serves as the cyber defense competition coach, a technology enthusiast and aspiring gadget designer.
Kyle is passionate about fostering the next generation of cybersecurity professionals as the coach of the cyber club. Since 2021, Kyle has led high school students to excel in prestigious cybersecurity competitions. His teams have defended nuclear reactors, built in secured pharmacy and hospital networks, and competed in international cyber defense challenges against college teams, all while earning scholarships and national recognition through hands-on learning real-world challenges and innovative teaching methods.
Kyle equips students with the skills and confidence needed to excel in the rapidly evolving fields of programming, cybersecurity, and gaming. His commitment to empowering students makes him an inspiring mentor and leader in the academic and cybersecurity communities. With that welcome Kyle. Thank you for joining me today.
Kyle Kuhlers:
Yes, thank you for having me, and I’m excited to kind of share a little bit about my journey and my path.
Steve Bowcut:
Perfect. We sincerely appreciate giving us some of our time and I know the audience is going to benefit from the things that you have to share with us today, so thank you. So with that, let’s get started with a little bit more about you. I think our audience would be interested in learning. What was your journey, how did you become interested in cybersecurity and then how that journey led you to where you’re at today.
Kyle Kuhlers:
So really my journey, I started and I went to college at the University of Iowa and I earned A BBA in marketing and finance.
Graduated in 1993 and then my first job out of college was an industry at Oral B manufacturing. And so they make the toothbrushes, all the manual toothbrushes, and so I was doing MIS work. We had eight different computer systems and the goal at the time, for the next eight years, I spent working on the task of trying get that number of systems down. And so we went from eight to five in the timeframe. When I was there, 2022 or 2002, I decided to change professions and to challenge myself in a little bit different way.
And so went back and got a teaching certificate and I’ve been teaching in high school since about 2003, so for about the last 21, 22 years. And so I’ve progressed along through some different, started as a business teacher, but then really kind of picked up the computer side.
In 2018, I had an opportunity to come to the career center and to do just computers and so started out in computer programming and web development and in 2020 a member, a community member went to my boss and said “I want the director of our building” and said, “I want cybersecurity taught at the building and I love to try new things. I love challenges”. And so my boss said “Hey, could we do this?” And I’m like, “Sure, we can figure it out”.
And so two months later from November to January 2022, I was teaching my first cybersecurity course and just kind of expanded from there. And so currently this year we have three cybersecurity courses and then we have three programming web development courses. And so I’m doing all six. And so that’s kind of a little bit cumbersome. And so there’s some talk down the road to maybe separate the two so I can just focus on the cybersecurity, but that’s kind of how I’ve gotten to where I’m at right now.
Steve Bowcut:
Okay, excellent. That’s kind of a common story I think in cybersecurity. Rarely do I have a guest on the show and they say, oh no, I haven’t wanted to be in cybersecurity since I was in high school. And that’s been my passion and that was the focus of my undergraduate.
Then I went out and got a graduate degree and the same thing that has happened on the show, but that is rare, more common, it’s something like this where you are a technology guy and the need for cybersecurity rose up in front of you and say you met the challenge and started teaching cybersecurity. So that is awesome. Thank you for that.
So let’s take a look at the programs that you offer from web programming and cybersecurity primarily, I guess the goals of the programs and how you would hope that they would prepare students for real-world challenges.
Kyle Kuhlers:
My big overarching goal, and it’s kind of the goal of our facility, is to prepare students to go out into the community and to get jobs. And so whether it’s career right away or to go on to post-secondary onto college either way and to prepare ’em to be productive citizens of our community. And so my goal then I see is to generate and keep excitement around it.
And so the high schoolers then will then either pursue a post-secondary option or through their certifications, through the learning they’ve done with us, they could go out right into the workforce. It’s more common that they’re going to go out onto post-secondary, whether it’s, and a lot of times it’s a community college and get a two year degree and then go out into the workforce or go onto the four-year degree.
And that was developed over time because the first class I taught was in my opinion and kind of looking back at it was too theory heavy. And so high schoolers are more interactive, more hands-on, need to be maybe entertained a little bit more. And so really had to adjust after that first class and really get into, so right now I really try and dive into the tools and
What tools are our community employers using that I can bring into my classroom and share and demonstrate and get the students familiar with so they at least know what some of those tools are. And so this last year in May of 2024, 26 of the 27 seniors that graduated did go on to post-secondary or a career right into a career in our community in it. So I’m really excited about that and I hope that that trend kind of continues.
Steve Bowcut:
Yeah, awesome. And it just made me think when you said that, so I love the fact that you are preparing these students to actually understand and maybe have some hands-on experience with the tools that they’re going to encounter in industry when they get a job or the same tools that they’ll be being taught using when they move on to a college for an academic setting.
But so how do you know what tools to choose? Do you talk to the industry? Do you get input from the local industry so that you’re kind of preparing people to stay local or how does that work?
Kyle Kuhlers:
Yeah, I do spend a lot of time with local employers, the community member that advocated and wanted cybersecurity. And part of the deal was, okay, you’ve got to kind of be our advisor along the way and help get us focused and what do we need to be doing? And to my surprise, one of the first things he said is “You need to post everything you do in LinkedIn”. And I’m just like LinkedIn, I have a LinkedIn account but I never use it.
And so started doing that and once we started doing that, community members started coming to us. And so another local employer and people that we didn’t even realize that were in the community that were doing cybersecurity, were reaching out and “Hey, how can I help?” “Hey, I do cybersecurity for the bank and if you have an intern, if you have a really good student, how can we connect and how can we help”?
And so my classroom, I always refer to it, it’s the public’s classroom. And so there are community members, there are cyber professionals, people always in my classroom interacting with my students and that’s a huge important piece of that. So that’s kind of one of the things where right away when it was told to me that cybersecurity and I got excited about it.
I spent probably the next year I was still teaching classes, but I would spend some time with local employers and so didn’t really do anything formalized or anything like that, but I would connect with them a lot of times through LinkedIn and I would just say, Hey, do you have an hour available on this day and can I sneak over after school or we’ve got a big lunch break, can I come over during this timeframe and just kind of talk? And so that community connection is vital.
Steve Bowcut:
That is so interesting. I hadn’t really thought about that, but that is, and I suppose cybersecurity is many other industries, the networking aspect of being a part of a community is so essential and the fact that you’re bringing that into the classroom and getting people in the community aware of what it is you are doing and maybe even some of the students aware of who’s in that community that they might start some networking with, that’s a great thing. I appreciate that. That is cool.
Kyle Kuhlers:
I want to do one quick example that I just thought of.
Steve Bowcut:
Certainly.
Kyle Kuhlers:
One of the community members that came in, he led an activity with the students and at the end of the day when he got ready to leave and the students were gone, he said to me, he said, “I want to hire those two students”. He had two students in mind. And I’m like, “They’re 17 years old”. And he is like, “Oh, our policy’s 18”. He’s like, “Give me 30 days”. And he went back to the employer and he got the policy changed from 18 to 17 and 60 days later both of those students were working for him as part of their high school day, their senior year.
Steve Bowcut:
Sure, exactly. Wow, that’s a great example. Actually, that’s a perfect example of what we were just talking about is helping students get integrated into that community and that network of cybersecurity professionals and industry professionals and vice versa. Thank you.
So some of the specific skills and knowledge areas that you emphasize, so are there ones that you like to key in on that that they need to have that you focus on?
Kyle Kuhlers:
A lot of what I start out with is just security awareness.
Steve Bowcut:
Okay
Kyle Kuhlers:
And so we do a physical building audit and kind of just being aware and paying attention to details. And I had to kind of laugh because this last time we did it, one of the kids was like, Hey, watch this. He’s like, come with me.
And so I went over and I kind watched, he walked up to the janitor and he said, Hey, I need to know where the electrical box is. And he said, oh, we got four of ’em. Let me show you where all four are. And the kid was just like, wow. And so putting them in those, a lot of the specific skill sets, a lot of it is social engineering and to a certain degree. And so when you get into the specific technical skills, we work with the CIA triad is where we really start when we get into that. The networking OSI model really in my first course, the CIA triad is so vital, so important.
And to have a deeper understanding. A lot of the tools that we use, we’re on a cyber range, and so kids are virtually connected to a college campus in Louisiana. We’re in Iowa, but we’re on a cyber range. And so they can do whatever they want. They’ve got full admin rights, they’ve got four machines, they’ve got a server, they’ve got a Windows machine, they’ve got Cali Linux and they’ve got Ubuntu. And so they can go and they can use Wireshark.
We do Nmap scans, Nessus, we just did Metasploit here. We’re towards the end of the semester. We don’t do that right away, but we’ve got into Metasploit and how to set up that adversary in the middle. And so students can actually, they’ve got two monitors and I’m like, okay, you’re running Metasploit on Linux over here on this monitor. So you’re an attacker in a foreign country and over here on the monitor to your right, you’re sitting at Waterloo, Iowa.
And so here’s your Google login. You type in your Google login and it pops up on the adversary’s machine through Metasploit, and that’s right in front of the student. So that keeps them excited and they’re just like, oh wow. So then when they go to college or when they move on into the workforce, they’re going to get the theory, but we got to get ’em there.
So that’s where I don’t want to bog ’em down with the theory. IP addresses, Mac addresses, active directory, John the Ripper, we do a lot of password cracking. John the Ripper Hash cat is a newer one that one of my cyber professionals that come in says every Monday morning, he is got a conglomeration of companies in a lot of different states and he said every Monday morning he runs a hashtag scan on all his employees to see what their passwords are.
And he said he’s got over a thousand employees in seven states. And he said, then he’ll send a message, Hey, you need to change your password. It’s not secure. And so we just got Flipper Zeros here right before break. Not sure how I’m going to get those integrated, but we’re going to figure something out there and get those integrated using the RFI radio frequency.
But some of the concepts that we really get on those are some of the tools, but some of the concepts, encryption, social engineering, phishing, steganography, we spend a lot of time on steganography, and kids get into that Linux operating system, the basic commands because if you get into anything more deep or anything, you’re going to look ’em up. Everybody’s got a cell phone, everybody’s got YouTube, and so you don’t need to have all those memorized. You got to have maybe memorized the basic ones.
And we have started getting into tunneling because one of our local businesses is really doing some things with tunneling. So we’ve kind of dabbled into that a little bit this semester. I don’t know if we’ll come back to it or not, but just kind of see. So those are kind some of the foundational pieces, tools that students get a chance to experience with. I encourage ’em, list it on your resume that you’ve used it. You don’t have to be an expert. You don’t have to be a Wireshark expert to have it listed on your resume. You know what it is, you’ve used it. You know how to open a packet. You can go in, you can do a search, you can find some plain text passwords or user login. You’re not doing anything real deep or extensive, but you know what it is. So put it on your resume.
Steve Bowcut:
Yeah, that is awesome. So from what you’ve described to me, it sounds like you’re giving the students an excellent technical foundation, but you’re also introducing some new tools, so things that are kind of cutting edge trends in the industry right now.
And I love the fact that you started that discussion by talking about the social engineering aspect because one of the things that I like to focus on in the show, and I know that a lot of people, the industry is really about technical skills and knowledge, but there are a lot of people who don’t really have technical skills and knowledge, but they would like to work in cybersecurity or maybe it’s better said, we need them in cybersecurity.
They can understand, they understand social engineering, they understand that yeah, if you say the right thing to the right people, they’ll tell you anything you want to know. As we all know and hear and read all the time, there’s always some social element to just about every cyber threat and attack. So that’s very important. So thank you for that. I appreciate that.
Kyle Kuhlers:
When a kid walks into my class, I tell ’em all the first day right away, they’re all social engineer experts because they do it every day with their parents.
Steve Bowcut:
Exactly right. They do it every day. Exactly. So keeping with that idea of trends and industry new emerging technologies, how do you integrate or how do you teach the students about things like AI and cloud security and those kinds of things?
Do you focus on that at all? The brand new things that they’re still students, so by the time they’re in industry, those are going to be all mainstream things that they have to know?
Kyle Kuhlers:
Yeah, that being older, when students come in, they have, a lot of times they have more experience with the AI, with the cloud security, and that’s okay. And that’s what I tell. Another thing I tell my students is when you walk out of my classroom, you need to be 10 times smarter than me. If you’re limited to my knowledge, the world’s in trouble.
So we need to be able to move forward, and AI is a great example of that because we don’t know what the problem’s gonna be tomorrow, but we got to be able to solve it. And so there’s not really any linear or where it’s always set the same in every semester. You’re teaching the same thing in the same way. And so I’ve taught now the one course, I think now six or seven semesters, and I’ve never taught it the same.
And so because of AI’s developing cloud, networking is developing. And so really kind of making sure that myself is staying professionally developed and going to conferences and making sure that I have a learning community that I can start to learn from beyond maybe just the community, but maybe some more technical pieces on the education side of, okay, how can I incorporate that and bring it in?
And so I love to problem solve, and that’s really what a lot of times is happening with AI and it’s solving a problem. And a lot of times it’s taken a repetitive action that a business has that a person’s doing and it’s automating it. And so one of my students who’s in college just came back and said, Hey, AI, there’s not going to be any jobs. And I’m like, actually, I think it’s going to be the opposite.
I think you’re going to need two humans for every AI automation that happens, but the jobs are going to be different. And that’s where the cybersecurity and the IT and the technical side, because a lot of the, I’m going to say mundane for lack of a better word, but a lot of the repetitive tasks that companies are doing, AI is going to be able to do, or you can write a computer program, a bot to do it.
And so that’s really a role that I think AI is going to play. And so really kind of putting students in opportunities where they can see and recognize what are some of those repetitive tasks that could be automated. And it’s a mindset of, hey, okay, yeah, so I’m thinking about this, so I need to come up with a way, okay, how can I write a computer program to do this?
How could I do this in Python? And so really it’s more of a mindset with the AI and the cloud security and giving it to be accepted. At first, people are like, Nope. I mean the school was like, oh, we’ve got it blocked. None of our students are using it.
Well, I asked my students and 70 of the 71 are using it because they’ve figured out a way around the school network to use it. So let’s teach it. Let’s get it out in the public, let’s put it out there and let’s roll with it and use it to defend systems and use it for good and build efficiencies.
Steve Bowcut:
Yeah, absolutely. That is such an important idea that these young people are coming into the classroom with more knowledge than I think maybe we give them credit for about these new technologies. Growing up with those things and things like AI, cloud security has been around a little longer, but the type of AI that we have today is relatively new.
But I’m always surprised when I talk to journalism students, for example, and you don’t need to tell them to use chat GPT, that’s their first go-to already. And it was only just a few years ago. My experience is the same as yours just a few years ago, colleges and universities we’re not going to use chat GPT, we’re not going to use AI, particularly in journalism classes. And I understand the inclination to do that.
I understand people need to understand, they need to know how to write and think and communicate by themselves, but these students are coming to these classes with the knowledge and they’ve already been using these tools, so we just need to teach them how to use the tools better. And it’s the same thing in cybersecurity. So that is an important concept. And I think we’ve talked already about some of the hands-on learning, the importance of hands-on learning and how you’ve integrated that into your teaching.
Is there anything else on that front that you wanted to mention? It seems like we’ve covered it pretty thoroughly, but I just want to give you an opportunity if there’s anything else you want to talk about, the hands, the importance of hands-on learning what you’re doing?
Kyle Kuhlers:
I think that, yeah, there is one thing I think, and one thing too is a lot of times students when they’re sitting in the classroom and they’re going through and they’re working with the wire shark, they’re working with Metasploit, they’re doing the competitions, the cybersecurity competitions, cyber defense competitions don’t discredit the learning that’s going on. And so is huge.
And so a lot of times students may think, well, not really a big deal. Didn’t really, maybe you don’t think you learned a lot. And so a good example of that is one of my students went to college and then this last summer he got a very prestigious internship and he beat out a lot of older college students. And so he was, after his freshman year at college, he beat out a lot of juniors and seniors and he was all ready to go in the interview.
After the interview he called me and he’s like, kuhlers, they didn’t talk anything about technical. He’s like, there’s no way I’m going to get this. He goes, all they wanted to talk about was what I did, the competitions that I participated in and all the, so he called it fun stuff and he’s like, all they talked about, well he got the job. And so he went back afterwards and he’s like, why did I get it? And they said, because you’re applying it, you’re using it and so you’re actually putting it into practice.
And so having that knowledge is great and a lot of people might have the knowledge, but what extra step are you taking now to apply it? And then being able to demonstrate that application, especially in an interview setting. And so I kind of had to laugh because I think he was expecting where he was going to have to spout off all these big IT words and he’s like, I’m ready to go. I’ve got this. But he ended up getting it.
And so don’t discredit the little things that you’re doing as a student, the learning outside of class that you’re doing, use YouTube, use all those tools out there that are available for you.
Steve Bowcut:
Perfect. I love that. I dunno if we touched on this or not, but it is important in professional certifications and other types of those kinds of qualifications, they’re sometimes key to getting a job, whether you’ve got a graduate degree or even a postgraduate degree.
What do you do in that regard? Do you focus on some of these certifications? Do you do test prep or make the students aware of them or what do you do there?
Kyle Kuhlers:
So every one of our classes at the career center for the high schoolers and our college level courses, and they have a certification tied to it. So every class they take from me, we do a certification, we don’t do any teaching to test or anything like that. Or we have a specific curriculum that we use.
Like I said, I do it different every time, otherwise I’d get bored. But pretty much what the learning is, it’s happening in the class, then students take the certification test. And so I’ve always done it at the end of the semester. And so this year, this semester, I was kind of curious, what if I had students take the test in the middle of the semester, would they pass? And so I tried it, but then students can retake it again because the school pays for the test and now the state has a fund where the state will reimburse the school. But we started doing this way before the state did anything.
And so students, where the certifications then become important is when students, it’s not. It’s an independent evaluation of your skillset. And a lot of times I don’t see necessarily the certification being the difference in getting an internship, but once you’re in the door, the certifications then an employer, what I see here in our area is the employer then says, oh hey, you know what? You’re coming in as an IT help desk, what the majority of our entry level cyber jobs are, IT help desk.
And so I had one kid, he was two days in IT help desk, and the employer said, look, I see you have this certification, this certification, this certification. Do you want to try something over here? And the kid was like, oh, heck yeah, definitely. And that particular student was very adamant that he wasn’t going to take the internship opportunity because it was IT help desk. And so it took me about two weeks of convincing him you’ve got to start at IT help desk, you get in the door, they’ll then move you into a situation that you’re going to like and you’re going to want, that’ll be better for you.
But getting in the door, sometimes you have to take a step and he would consider it a step back doing the IT help desk. So maybe you have to take a step back, get in the door, and then you can get into the cyber area. My last student that had a high school internship here last semester, two weeks, two weeks after he was in, they said, Hey, we see that you have, he was doing help desk because they bring again, majority of them in his help desk and they said, Hey, you have a cybersecurity certification.
Do you want to do networking or what area? What flavor do you want to do networking? Do you want to do database? Do you want to do the actual security with the users? And that sort? So they got him into the cybersecurity and they let him spend a day in each area and then he’s like, I want to do cybersecurity. So really the IT help desk is going to be in a lot of cases your entry point, but don’t, not take an opportunity because it’s IT help desk.
One kid’s like, I can’t talk on the phone. I’m like, I know you can’t text you. Like you’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. And so just taking that opportunity and then knowing that it’ll lead to a bigger opportunity very quickly in a lot of cases is what I’m seeing.
Steve Bowcut:
Yeah, very good. Okay, let’s get some advice for our audience. As we talked earlier, our audience, our audience is primarily of students that are deciding, still deciding whether cybersecurity is the direction they want to go, or it may be an early career professional who maybe is in programming or some of their IT field and they’re thinking about cybersecurity. So what kind of advice would you give someone who’s thinking about cybersecurity?
Kyle Kuhlers:
One of the biggest pieces of advice I would give you is what are you doing with your time? So your time outside of class, your time, outside of the structured time where you have requirements, where you have to be, are you, do you have a home network that you play around with? And make sure that you have that listed on your resume.
And so being able to sell yourself, but your time. And so are you participating in competitions? Are you connected professionally with a local group of IT professionals? Are you doing eSports? Are you doing a hackathon on a weekend for 24 hours or a game? A gameathon for 48 hours. And so get involved in some of those things because employers really want to see that because that demonstrates passion and competitions are huge.
There’s a lot of cyber competitions out there. And so we do our school, we have a cyber club and we do a lot of competitions and it’s not usually the same students. And so student will do two or three of ’em, but they’re not going to do all 10 that we do. But do what you can do and what time allows and don’t ever think, “I’m not smart enough”, “I can’t do this”. You know what, if you want to learn it, if you want to figure it out, there’s someone there to help you along the way.
And so connections are important. And that’s where I really connecting with the community and connecting with cyber professionals. At all of our cyber club meetings. When we do the competitions, there’s a handful, maybe eight to 10 local cyber professionals that are my go-to. Now I’ve got a couple that have graduated from the WCC, graduated from the local community college and are now working in cybersecurity jobs in our community.
So they’re coming back and learn from them and ask them questions, interact. And so really kind of a lot of times my son always calls it put yourself out there and so take a chance and take a risk. And so at Oral-B, words mattered. And so instead of using the word “fail” and teachers say this all the time, oh, go ahead and do that. Don’t be afraid to fail. When I was at Oral-B, one of the first things I learned right out of colleges, words mattered.
And so at Oral-B, you had to replace the word “fail” with the word. Okay, I’m going to go to the other one first. You had to replace the word “problem”. Oral-B had no problems. You had to replace that word with opportunity. So instead of seeing the word problem, you put opportunity. And so instead of using the word “fail”, it’s okay to fail. Teachers say that all the time, oh, it’s okay to fail, but that’s got a negative connotation. Replace it with “curious”.
“It’s okay to be curious”, now it’s something that is engaging to students. And students are like, “Oh, hey, yeah, I am curious”. It’s not kind of like if I fail, students internalize that and then they’re just like, “I don’t want to fail, I want to be curious”. “I want to learn”. And so replace that word, don’t use “fail” use “curious”. And at Oral-B, those two words “fail” and “problem” you could not use. And that’s kind of stuck with me. And at first kids think it’s goofy, but then I start to hear them saying it and stuff. And so I’m just kind of sit back and I get the last laugh on it.
Steve Bowcut:
Yeah, that is good because certainly a certain amount of failure associated with being curious, right? That’s what being curious is. You’re going to go in and try stuff. Some things will work, some things won’t work. That’s pretty good.
So you mentioned the student that might come to you and think, oh, I’m not smart enough to do this. So that is a misconception. Are there any other common mistakes or misconceptions that you see the students coming to you with that you try and correct or weed out?
Kyle Kuhlers:
Sometimes students will say, oh, I don’t have time. I just take that as lack of interest. Just blow that off. And that’s fine because you’re going to spend your time and where your interests are. And so that’s fine. Again, the connections, being able to communicate and have a conversation, make small talk with people.
And so coming back a little bit, circling back around to the IT help desk, one of the things that we do as a class and as our cyber club is we go out into the 55 and over independent living retirement villages once a month and we do a one hour IT help desk and I call it IT help desk.
And now kids are like, oh, hey, IT help desk. That’s not that bad. We can do that. And so look for things that are going to surround yourself with people who are going to be positive and look for those connections that are really going to help you meet your goals. And so I may not be smart enough, but look for people who are smarter than you and learn from ’em.
And there’s a lot of things that you can kind of sit back and watch and learn, maybe not how to do it, don’t do it that way. And so those sort of things. But yeah, so just kind of pay attention to details and really communication and learning how to, intergenerational communication a lot of times because kids are going to be like, well, that person’s older. I don’t want to talk to that person. That person’s older. Well, you know what? You’ve grown up with a cell phone. You have technology skills that that person may not have and that might be intimidating. So teach that person, use it as a teaching opportunity and bring them along.
Steve Bowcut:
What a great way for young people to share what seems like common knowledge to them because they’ve grown up with it with people who it’s not common knowledge for. And not only in the IT help desk kind of venue, but also with cybersecurity.
There are a lot of seniors in this world who really don’t understand the basics of cybersecurity because they didn’t grow up with it. They’d never had to understand it when they were younger. And there’s a lot that high school students could do to help them understand the basics of password management. And don’t click on the link. It’s probably not what it looks like it is.
Kyle Kuhlers:
One thing I want to add that I just thought of is find ways to help build your confidence in your skillset. And so, one of the examples is when we went to the 55 and over home, one of the first things that a student got asked to do and the student, I was just like, oh my gosh, this is going to be interesting to watch.
But the person was probably, I don’t know, 70, 80, maybe even 90 years old, went up and she’s like, I just want to be able to send my granddaughter this picture in my cell phone. I know what her email address, I just want to attach it in an email and send it. And so the kid did it and then the kid come over and he goes, that’s IT Help desk.
Steve Bowcut:
Exactly.
Kyle Kuhlers:
And I’m like, it’s not that hard. And you have the skillsets. And they’re like, they don’t know how to do that. And it’s kind of like what you said, they’ve grown up with it, and so it’s secondhand and so older generations we haven’t grown up with it.
Steve Bowcut:
Exactly. That’s so good. All right, so we’re about out of time. I want to end with one last question here, and I think we’ve touched on it a little bit. So the question is about recommending resources and tools or habits, and I feel like you’ve covered this pretty well. We talked about LinkedIn as maybe a source or a community that students could get involved in, but is there anything else along that front that you would recommend for students to get involved with?
Kyle Kuhlers:
LinkedIn, definitely connects socially. Try Hack Me, to maybe build your skill sets. If you get to the point where you’ve got, Try Hack Me, mastered, move on to Hack The Box. And so they start out free, but then there’s a paid version. And so that will really help you build your technical skill side of things. There’s Brian Krebs, Krebs on Security is a great blog to follow and to pay attention to and to see what’s going on.
Build a home network, dabble around with IT at home, get connected with, find someone who’s going to advocate for you. And that’s where your connections with your Chamber of Commerce, your TAI, technical Technology Associates of Iowa, get connected into an IT community group and then pick their brains and ask ’em questions and then maybe find a mentor.
Someone who you can spend more time with, because that person will advocate for you out on the home front. Your teachers are a great resource. I just got a call two weeks ago from a bank right after Christmas and the gal said, Hey, we’ve got an IT specialist job that just came open. Give me three names of recent graduates. And so get connected is big, big, big, big, big.
Steve Bowcut:
Yep. Perfect. Alright, we are out of time, but Kyle, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for giving us part of your day to help young people understand how they can get into cybersecurity and what they need to know and things that they can do to achieve their goals. So thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Kyle Kuhlers:
You betcha. Thank you very much. And I look forward to being able to retire and know that my retirement savings are secure and I can travel.
Steve Bowcut:
One of your students is watching over it. That’s perfect. All right. Thank you and a big thanks to our listeners for being with us today. Please remember to subscribe and review if you find this podcast interesting. And join us next time for another episode of the Cybersecurity Guide Podcast.