Dalal Alharthi
Note: Titles and affiliations appear as they were at time of award.
Forming Career-Ready Cybersecurity Professionals
Learning how to do the work is not the same as doing the work or even knowing what the work is. In cybersecurity education, students master critical skills essential for the profession. Yet, career planning happens, if at all, as a separate and later concern. Informed in part by the Fellow's experience across professional and academic domains, this project embeds a career-alignment intervention into cybersecurity courses to build robust, career-ready professional identities. Grounded in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and seeking to further contribute to it, this project also examines how this novel career-alignment intervention impacts career self-efficacy and job-market literacy. The study includes investigating the intervention's impact when scaled up and delivered through faculty-adoptable modules. The project will produce a validated assessment instrument, a student-authored field guide, and open-access D2L modules. Its signature contribution is a transferable framework connecting classroom teaching and learning with meaningful careers across disciplines and institutions.