Beyond Collaboration: Universities & Partners | April Augustine

Dr. Sasha Vanterpool (Senior Cyber Workforce Consultant at Skillrex) applies the data-driven "Moneyball" mindset to modern cybersecurity organizations. Just as baseball teams stopped relying on legacy scouting metrics to find undervalued players, security leaders must look beyond traditional credentials like degrees or static certifications and start measuring actual skills intelligence.

Modern organizations spend hundreds of billions annually on "next-gen" security platforms, yet global losses to cyber crime continue to rise exponentially. In this data-driven session, Dr. Jordan Howell (Professor at the University of South Florida & CEO of Ventel) cuts through industry marketing hype to present real, peer-reviewed, empirical evidence connecting corporate infrastructure exposure directly to internal organizational culture.

In this joint presentation, Dr. Marbin Pazos Revilla (Bellini College of AI, Cybersecurity, and Computing) and Dr. Clinton Daniel (Muma College of Business, University of South Florida) detail a case study on their 10+ year workforce pipeline partnership with enterprise security giant Reliaquest. This blueprint covers how the university modernizes its cybersecurity curriculum around the newly updated NIST NICE Cybersecurity Workforce Framework, dropping legacy instructional models to account for autonomous agentic AI disruptions.