New Teaching Technologies Help Train Tomorrow's Top Talent

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / December 30, 2022 / As we face a historic skills shortage across industries and particularly in STEM, I’m inspired by programs that offer a fresh approach to skilling our future colleagues and leaders. Experiential programs like hackathons and accessible technologies like virtual reality are creating more opportunities to deliver richer learning to more students. This is key for many STEM professions like cybersecurity analysts, which require problem-solving and collaboration.

One example of new teaching technologies is in IBM’s work with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). We are collaborating with 20 HBCUs to bring new technical training opportunities to students and co-create cybersecurity training centers. Faculty and students have free access to IBM SkillsBuild coursework, lectures, certifications, cloud-based software, and professional development. Within these centers, we also hold immersive “Capture the Flag” simulations. These are not the hide-and-seek games of our childhood, but they do require mental gymnastics to find hypothetical cybercriminals. Conceptually, it’s similar to Escape Rooms, where teams parse clues to solve puzzles.