SAIT: News and Events
CCBC Network Technology Students Place First in 3rd Mid-Atlantic Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC)
9 schools, 139 undergraduate and graduate students and 20 faculty members, representing two- and four-year schools from Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. competed on January 12th and 19th in the 3rd Mid-Atlantic Regional Collegiate CCDC qualifying rounds. The top two teams from each qualifying round competed in the 3rd Mid-Atlantic Regional CCDC.
The CCBC student team of Becki Dorffner, Kessely Korboi, Matt Streb, Matt Wines, Justin Wray, and Jeff Yates placed first overall. The other participating teams in the Regional CCDC included James Madison University, George Washington University, and Towson University.
CCBC will go on to represent the Mid-Atlantic region in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition in San Antonio, Texas April 18-20. CCBC is the first community college in the country to qualify for the National CCDC.
For more information, contact Casey W. O'Brien at ext. 27-6139.
The new report, America's Forgotten Middle-Skill Jobs, by Harry Holzer, of Georgetown University, and Robert Lerman, of American University, has helped to launch a new campaign spearheaded by the Workforce Alliance, Skills2Compete. The campaign hopes to address economic competitiveness in a way that includes training current and emerging workers for jobs in the middle of the labor market--those that require more than high school, but less than a 4-year degree. To learn more, go to Skills2Compete.
8 Hottest Skills for '08
By Thomas Hoffman, Computerworld, 01/03/08
1. Programming/application development. As companies continue to Web-enable their existing applications and plow deeper into Web 2.0, demand is red-hot right now for people with AJAX, .Net and PHP skills, says Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director at Robert Half Technology in Menlo Park, Calif. Plus, as a growing number of organizations begin adopting Microsoft Corp.'s Silverlight 1.0 richmedia software tools, expect to see rising demand for people expertise in that area, says Spencer Lee (also see 12 IT skills that employers can't say no to. And, for a different take, don't miss Top 10 dead [or dying] computer skills).
2. Project management. CIOs are hungry for project managers who have extensive experience overseeing complex efforts that have delivered clear business benefits -- not just someone who has obtained a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from Project Management Institute Inc., says David Van De Voort, principal consultant at Mercer International Inc. in Chicago. Many organizations, such as Sabre Holdings, are applying agile development test-driven development techniques. Finding people with finely-honed skills in these areas "is extremely important," says Sara Garrison, senior vice president of product and solutions development at the Southlake, Texas-based air travel data company. Also, expect to see heightened demand for quality assurance specialists to help test and check new systems that are being rolled out, says Dan Reynolds, CEO of Princeton, N.J.-based staffing firm The Brokers Group LLC.
3. Help desk/technical support. Do the math. As companies continue to expand their application portfolios, more help desk and technical support experts will be needed to support those systems. And much of that expertise will need to be on-premises, with only a fraction of the work being shifted to overseas call centers in places like Bangalore, India. Demand for support staff will remain strong as commercial applications from vendors such as IBM and Microsoft continue to become more complex, notes CompTIA's Hopkins. "You'll need higher-skilled workers not only to implement but [also] to manage these systems," he says. And as operations for multinational organizations become increasingly globalized, demand for multilingual help desk staffers will also rise, says Spencer Lee.
4. Security. There will always be demand for IT professionals with core security credentials, such as intrusion-detection capabilities and government security clearances, but database and wireless security projects will drive that demand even higher this year. Thanks to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, "there has to be a way to control security on databases and networks to a level that we've never had to lock it down before," says Joel Reiter, an application analyst at U.S. Bancorp in St. Paul, Minn.
5. Data centers. There has been a flurry of activity among companies and government agencies to upgrade or relocate their data centers to take advantage of virtualization and other recent data automation and efficiency gains. The data center gold rush is also being fueled by expanding data management and storage requirements being imposed by regulations such as the Sarbanes- Oxley act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). And as organizations place greater reliance on open systems to run mission-critical applications, many companies are recruiting experienced mainframe technicians to apply the same type of "industrial-strength computing" disciplines they've acquired to distributed systems, says CompTIA's Hopkins. Meanwhile, demand for database management experts is growing "simply because organizations are putting a heck of a lot more of their business [data] on these very large databases," says Hopkins.
6. Business knowledge. As IT organizations strive to align more closely with the businesses they support, demand remains strong for people with business acumen, whether they're specialized business analysts, business liaisons or application developers and other technicians with business-specific knowledge. "It's not impossible for us to find a technical person, but it is more difficult to find someone who can be a jack of all trades [across technical skills] with the business acumen to be a combination business analyst/systems analyst," says Quiznos' Hood. "It's hard to find that total package of skill sets."That's also helping to drive demand for technologists who can serve as IT/business "translators," says Robert Rosen, immediate past president of Share, an IBM user group, and CIO of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases in Bethesda, Md.
7 & 8. Networking and telecommunications. All sorts of networking skills are hot right now, including general network administration capabilities and network convergence, wireless and network security talents, as organizations collapse their voice and data networks with wireless and voice-over-IP technologies, says Mercer's Van De Voort. "There's a great opportunity for people in the infrastructure space as well, including messaging administrators and network/systems administrators who act as the air-traffic controllers for email, corporate networks and PDAs," says Robert Half Technology's Spencer Lee. There's also huge demand for people with wireless know-how, particularly those with security skills, as a growing number of organizations try to build secure mobile applications, says Sabre's Garrison. "The Achilles' heel in the networking world is how to handle security in a networked environment," says Garrison. This article is reprinted courtesy of NetworkWorld.com Copyright ©2008 Global Knowledge Training LLC All rights reserved.
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County Executive Jim Smith Honors CCBC Cyber Defense Team
County Executive, Jim Smith will honor the CCBC Cyber Defense Team on Thursday, May 29 at 2:30 p.m. in conference room #118 on the first level of the Old Courthouse, 400 Washington Ave. in Towso for the 2008 1st place win in the Mid Atlantic Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition Cup. Congratulations CCBC Cyber Defense Team.
CompTIA Exams Now Available
The SAIT Department is pleased to announce that discount vouchers for the following CompTIA exams are now available for purchase at the CCBC Bookstore on the Catonsville Campus:
- CompTIA A+ Essentials (JKO-601)
- CompTIA A+ IT Technician (JKO-602)
- CompTIA Security + (JKO-010)
- CompTIA Network+ (JKO-012)
- These vouchers provide a discounted price for the examinations to CCBC students with valid student IDs and are not transferrable to other individuals. To obtain the vouchers please contact Andrew Hanks at the Catonsville Bookstore (410-455-4330) (email ahanks@ccbcmd.edu). Currently the vouchers are only available at the Catonsville location; however, they will be available at the other bookstores at a later date.
UMUC to Host Instant Scholarship Award Days at CCBC Campuses
University of Maryland University College (UMUC) is launching the Maryland Community College Transfer Scholarship for the 2008-2009 school year with an Instant Scholarship Award Day at the CCBC Campuses. The Maryland Community College Transfer Scholarship is the state’s largest scholarship for community college students. UMUC offers this renewable scholarship to outstanding students from participating community colleges. Recipients may be awarded $3,300 per year for full time study or $1,650 per year for part time study. The Instant Scholarship Award Days will be held at the Dundalk campus Tuesday, March 11th from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm, Essex on Tuesday, April 8th from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm and Catonsville on Tuesday, April 15th from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm. The Instant Scholarship Award Day is a time for students to come and speak individually with UMUC representatives, apply to UMUC, and be awarded the Community College Transfer Scholarship. To participate in this great opportunity, students must bring their most up to date copies of all college transcripts. To qualify for the scholarship a student must have an Associate’s degree earned by the Fall 2008 semester, a minimum 3.0 GPA and is a citizen or eligible non-citizen. Qualified students will receive a temporary award letter that will place a scholarship on hold for them so they can submit their documentation. Required documentation will include the FAFSA and official transcripts showing that the student has at least a 3.0 GPA and will earn an Associate’s degree before September. For more information, please visit www.umuc.edu/ccsp or contact Constance Buckley at cbuckley@umuc.edu.
CCBC Students Compete in HACKING Competiton
When it comes to maintaining a business network, keeping up with today’s blitz of technological advances makes it difficult enough, but fending off increasingly aggressive and malicious hackers can make it almost impossible. At the 3rd Mid-Atlantic Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC), students will have the opportunity to test their prowess at averting the advances of a team of professional hackers set to attack their simulated business networks. Hosted by the Community College of Baltimore County, in conjunction with White Wolf Security and the CyberWATCH Center, and partially funded by the National Science Foundation, the three-day event will take place March 7-9, at White Wolf Security, located at 1052 New Holland Ave, Lancaster, PA.
This competition is unique in that it focuses on the operational aspect of managing and protecting an existing network infrastructure and does not include any design elements. Students representing the CCBC, George Washington University, James Madison University, and Towson University, will be scored based on their ability to detect and respond to outside threats; maintain availability of existing services like E-mail servers and Web servers; respond to business requests such as the addition or removal of additional services; and balance security needs against business needs. The attacks will be executed by representatives of technology giants AOL, SAIC, and MTM Technologies.
The goal of the competition is to provide the hands-on application of information assurance skills, while enhancing students’ understanding of both theory and practice. Winners of the regional contest, which expects to draw approximately 100 people, will move on to the April 2007 national competition in San Antonio, Texas.
For additional information and a complete schedule of events, visit the 3rd Mid-Atlantic Regional CCDC Web site at http://www.cyberwatchcenter.org/ccdc/ or contact Casey W. O'Brien at cobrien@ccbcmd.edu or (410) 780-6139