NEWS & EVENTS

TOMS RIVER — The Ocean County College (OCC) Cybersecurity curriculum has adopted two partner courses for the fall 2021 semester. Each is designed to prepare OCC students for valuable industry certifications.

The first is CompTIA’s Security+ (SY0-601) course, which is delivered via their CertMaster Learn™ System and includes lab exercises. It will be complemented by two lectures a week, using CompTIA presentation materials. This will be delivered as OCC’s redesigned “CSIT 200 Information Security Fundamentals” course.

The second is EC Council’s Certified Ethical Hacker version 11 (CEHv11) course, which has been fully integrated into OCC’s Canvas Learning Management System. It consists of two modules per week, including lectures, labs, reading assignments, student summary essays, discussion topic, a short quiz, and additional links and resources. This will be delivered as OCC’s new “CSIT 240 Certified Ethical Hacking: Tools and Techniques” course.

Upon completion of each of these courses, successful students will have the option of obtaining practice test packages and exam vouchers through academic partner discounts, or for qualified students, via subsidies through OCC.

“With the rash of cybersecurity breaches in the news today, credentialed cybersecurity professionals are a valuable commodity,” says Jon Weiss, college lecturer II, Computer Science. “Our curriculum here at OCC is designed to prepare our students to fill these roles by leveraging the best training from our recognized certification provider partners.”

Specifically in New Jersey, from April 2020 through March 2021, employers advertised more than 11,100 job openings for cybersecurity workers, according to data from CyberSeek, the leading source of information on the U.S. cybersecurity job market.

Nationally there were more than 464,000 openings during the same 12-month period. These openings covered a range of occupations, including cybersecurity analyst, network engineer, network architect, vulnerability analyst, penetration tester and cybersecurity manager. Per the CompTIA Workforce and Learning Trends 2021 study, 93% of HR professionals indicate certifications are relevant in validating a candidate’s knowledge and job expertise to fill such openings, with 44% identifying certifications as highly relevant and 49% responding that they are moderately relevant.

Visit the Cybersecurity program page or contact Jon Weiss, college lecturer II, Computer Science at jweiss@ocean.edu for more information.

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