The 502 Project bridges the gap between interested students and the professional cybersecurity community by creating a persistent online platform that fosters mentorship, academic advising, and participation in centralized events – providing a social infrastructure for cybersecurity workforce development. Through centralized virtual events, interconnected event support, and ongoing challenges, the project works to make the cybersecurity workforce more accessible, more inclusive, and more broadly participatory. Recruiting students and subject matter experts via existing local and regional cybersecurity awareness events, the 502 Project operates as community grounded career pathway, while providing employers the ability to target specific forms of talent. Partner institutions will leverage the 502 platform to enhance their existing cybersecurity education offerings, ultimately building a more diverse and inclusive cybersecurity workforce pipeline.
The 502 Project is specifically intended to highlight and extend cybersecurity education efforts at partnering universities and state colleges, expanding the reach and scale of locally developed curricula, maintaining connections between faculty and students, and providing access to centralized events and curricula resources.
GenCyber/CAE Proposals
Download a draft statement to include in your 2024/2025 GenCyber proposal. This material is meant as a starting point, and may be slightly edited for length.
Contribute Resources
The 502 Project uses CLARK, the Cybersecurity Labs and Resource Knowledge-base, as a platform for building and sharing free cybersecurity curricula.
Join the community
Help build the 502 Discord community as a mentor, student, activity host, partner organization, or supporter.