At a meeting of Career and Technical Education professionals, someone asked, “What skills should we teach students to prepare them for the jobs of the future?”
It is an important question, but it may begin with the wrong assumption. The future cannot be known precisely, so education should not prepare students only for current occupations. It must prepare them to adapt as work changes.
Education must provide technical knowledge, but its larger task is to develop adaptability, communication, problem-solving, ethical judgment, and the ability to continue learning.
This is especially important in cybersecurity.
I began teaching later in life, after many years working in the same industry I was asked to teach in. Soon, I realized that the traditional classroom was poorly suited to cybersecurity. Rows of desks, long lectures, uniform assignments, and textbook-driven instruction did not reflect the way technical work was performed.
Cybersecurity is not a spectator activity.
Students must configure systems, make mistakes, diagnose problems, research unfamiliar issues, communicate with teammates, defend decisions, and recover from failure. They need opportunities to practice rather than simply memorize.
I learned this principle years earlier while serving as a young soldier in South Korea.
A fellow soldier repeatedly asked me to play chess. I always refused because the game seemed boring. Eventually, I agreed to learn.
He began explaining openings, strategies, middle-game tactics, and other concepts. I stopped him. The language of chess meant nothing to me because I had not yet experienced the game.
I told him I needed to know only two things: the purpose of the game and how each piece moved.
He explained those basics, and we began playing.
He beat me quickly in the first game. We played again, and I began to understand. We continued playing, and the game came alive. Only later, after I had gained experience, did books about openings, sacrifices, and endgames become useful to me.
The experience gave me a structure into which formal knowledge could fit.
I carried that lesson into my classroom.
Students do not always need a lengthy explanation before beginning. Sometimes they need a purpose, a few essential rules, a realistic problem, and permission to try. From there, they can learn as they go.
I think of this as inside-out learning. Students encounter the larger activity first. They learn concepts as they become necessary. Formal knowledge then deepens an experience that has already become meaningful.
In networking classes, I used Cisco Packet Tracer, a simulation tool that allows students to build virtual networks, configure devices, and observe whether information reaches its destination.
Instead of merely hearing about routers, switches, addresses, and protocols, students could work with them. They could drag equipment into a virtual space, connect devices, make configuration errors, test the network, and determine why it failed.
The software did not replace teaching. Instead, it changed the teacher’s role.
I became less of a lecturer and more of a guide. Students worked through scenarios in which they acted as network administrators responsible for meeting an organization’s needs. They researched problems, compared solutions, and helped one another.
I also changed the physical classroom. Desks arranged in rows were replaced with small groups. This encouraged discussion, collaboration, and peer teaching. Students with different strengths could contribute to a shared task.
As a result, learning began to emerge through the work itself.
The same principle guided my cybersecurity classes. I taught students the basic purpose of system hardening, introduced a few essential concepts, and asked them to begin securing a computer. Some initially insisted that they did not know enough.
I reminded them that they had instructions, classmates, prior knowledge, and access to research. They were not expected to know everything before beginning. They were expected to investigate, test, make mistakes, and improve.
This approach helped students develop independence and confidence. It also prepared them for cybersecurity competitions and more advanced coursework.
Traditional textbooks presented another challenge. In a rapidly changing field, a printed book can become outdated soon after publication. That does not make textbooks worthless, but it does mean they should not serve as the sole foundation of a cybersecurity course.
I kept the curriculum’s structure and required standards, but I drew on current technical documentation, trusted online resources, security advisories, news reports, simulations, and instructor-created scenarios.
Current events made the subject real. A major data breach or newly discovered vulnerability could become part of a lesson. Students could examine what happened, why it happened, how the attackers succeeded, and what defenses might have reduced the damage.
That kind of flexibility is difficult when every student must move through the same textbook at the same pace.
Cybersecurity students often enter a classroom with dramatically different skill levels. Some have never opened a computer’s administrative tools. Others have spent years experimenting with operating systems, coding, gaming, or home networks.
As a result, lockstep instruction leaves some students behind while holding others back.
A better model combines clear standards with multiple pathways. Students should be able to progress at different speeds, receive more support where needed, and move toward more challenging work when ready.
Cyber ranges, simulations, virtual laboratories, and scenario-based exercises can support this model. They allow students to practice defending systems in controlled environments without endangering real networks.
Students can investigate incidents, identify vulnerabilities, harden systems, check activity, document evidence, and work as members of a team. They can experience the pressure and uncertainty of cybersecurity while staying in a safe learning environment.
Cybersecurity is a performance discipline. Students must learn to diagnose, configure, defend, communicate, and recover — not merely select correct answers on an examination.
Education should not simply transfer information from an instructor to a student. It should help students become capable of acting when the instructor is no longer present, because that is the point of preparing them for an uncertain future.
Moving Forward With Our Eyes Open
Technology is not merely a collection of machines. It is a human system of purposes, choices, values, and consequences.
It begins with our needs, but it does not remain under our control simply because we created it. Instead, technology enters the world, interacts with human institutions, and changes the environment in which future choices are made.
We do not need to reject technology. Nor should we accept every new development simply because it is faster, more efficient, or profitable.
We need to see technology clearly: as a force that shapes choices, values, and consequences.
That means understanding what it gives us and what it takes away. It means recognizing who benefits, who bears the cost, and what kinds of behavior a system encourages. It means protecting our information, questioning automated decisions, and holding designers and institutions accountable.
It also means changing how we educate people, because they should learn to understand and question the systems that shape their lives.
Students should not be prepared merely to use existing tools. They should learn how systems work, how to question them, how to build alternatives, and how to respond when technology fails.
Building something changes a person’s understanding more deeply than simply using it. For example, a student who plays a video game, experiences the world created by someone else. A student who builds a game begins to understand rules, systems, incentives, choices, and consequences.
That distinction matters far beyond technology.
Technological literacy enables people to participate in shaping the world rather than merely adapting to it. It allows them to make safer personal choices, contribute to public debate, and question the claims of companies, governments, experts, and machines.
The future should not belong only to the people who design the systems, own the platforms, write the algorithms, and control the data. It also belongs to the people who must live with the consequences.
We do not all need to become engineers, programmers, or cybersecurity professionals. But we do need enough understanding to protect ourselves, educate the next generation, take part in public decisions, and preserve the parts of life that make us human.
Technology will continue to move forward, whether we are ready or not.
The question is whether we will move with it blindly or with our eyes open, ready to see clearly, act wisely, and live with the consequences.
Editor’s note: Thomas Holt Russell, III is the founder of SEMtech (Student Engagement & Mentoring in Tech), a writer, educator, photographer, modern-day Luddite, Existentialist, and secular humanist
