We spend a lot of time talking about the FUTURE of the cybersecurity workforce. By 2021, more than 3.5 million job openings will impact the security posture of enterprise, government, and academic institutions across the globe. But we don’t spend a lot of time talking about the PAST. History can tell us a lot about where we’ve been and inform where we’re going—and the case is no exception when it comes to hiring the next generation of cyber professionals. Laura Lee will share how a 1940’s secret recruiting campaign targeting female high school teachers and recent college graduates for cryptanalyst jobs set an expectation for diversity in coding. That effort to hire code breakers analyzed the attributes needed to be successful in this field that is now cyber. Laura will discuss why examining the hiring and employee retention methods leading up to World War II can help the cybersecurity workforce challenges of today and how we can use modern techniques, such as gamification to IDENTIFY – SCREEN - ASSESS – PLACE – TRAIN – RETAIN staff. She will describe methods that rely on Artificial Intelligence to help instruct and score cybersecurity professionals. This talk is designed to stimulate ideas in the audience on “How to Grow Cybersecurity Professionals” in the modern world. After a short presentation, Laura will engage the audience with example cyber games that illustrate the attacker’s kill chain, show the relationship between common ports and protocols, reinforce binary and hexadecimal conversion and play good old-fashioned cyber trivia!