Recognizing an opportunity to teach scouts real-world skills, the Girl Scouts of the USA has recently partnered with Palo Alto Networks to develop a program consisting of 18 earnable badges to teach scouts cybersecurity skills. Girl Scout badges are insignia awarded to scouts once they have completed requirements to develop mastery of a given topic - and the number of possible badges available across all levels of scouts numbers in the hundreds. This partnership was announced by Girl Scouts of the USA CEO Sylvia Acevedo at the Palo Alto Networks Ignite '17 conference in Vancouver, Canada. An accomplished woman herself, Acevedo reports that the addition of these new badges open opportunities to scouts of all ages to explore topics in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), while also developing leadership and problem-solving skills. In fact, the emphasis put on STEM learning as a young Girl Scout is what led Acevedo into her career as a rocket scientist at the Jet Propulsion Labs at NASA and she also reports that 90% of female astronauts who've been to space were Girl Scouts, along with 80% of female leaders in Silicon Valley. “So we know how to create that STEM pipeline, and in the past two years we have had more than 1.8 million hands-on science activities, with computer science and cyber security being the top two things that Girl Scouts wanted to learn more about,” said Acevedo.
Girls as young as five years old will have opportunities to participate in the program, which also spans up to high school age scouts. The first badges are expected to be awarded in September 2018. Palo Alto Networks, the partner in this project, is a Santa Clara, California-based network and enterprise security company.
Not only are the cybersecurity skills earned by scouts useful, they are also needed in the marketplace. Cybersecurity Ventures reports that there will be a global deficit of 3.5 million cybersecurity professionals by 2021, and as it is women account for just 11% of these professionals currently. Sadly, reports by the Computing Technology Industry Association show that 69% of women who had interest in pursuing IT careers chose not to out of concern for lack of opportunties later on. The Girl Scouts of the USA hopes to change this - their programs aim to prepare women for these types of careers should they choose to pursue them, which will ultimately bring more diversity to the industry. “It is our hope that this collaboration will serve to cultivate our troops’ budding interest in cyber security by providing access to invaluable knowledge that may not otherwise be available to girls in many communities across the US,” Acevedo said.
Click here to read more of this story at Computer Weekly.