Citing 500,000 unfilled cybersecurity positions in the U.S., Bank of America has announced a partnership with Liberty Science Center in New Jersey to help high school STEM students in underserved areas acquire cybersecurity skills, and potentially, jobs.

The $3.1 billion Charlotte, N.C.-based bank said the dearth of cybersecurity professionals was impetus for the program in a company release. The program comes on the heels of the bank’s Q2 $800 million investment in technology.

“The focus is to accelerate alternate learning paths so that they can accelerate and meet current and future labor market needs, specifically STEM and cybersecurity,” Alberto Garofalo, Bank of America’s market president for New Jersey, told Bank Automation News. “Students who successfully complete the accelerated learning path and meet the conditions of appointments will be offered quality jobs, as employees that are focused on emerging technology.”

Low-level code and cybersecurity training and STEM-focused courses will be provided to the students, who could later help fill jobs in banking, cybersecurity and the energy sector. In New Jersey alone, there are 1.4 million open jobs waiting to be filled in various fields, according to Garofalo.

Planning for the future

Bank of America will accept 20 to 30 students from a pair of high schools in New Jersey to take part in the two-year pilot program, with the goals of improving students’ job readiness and eventually expanding the program to numerous high schools across the country. The bank previously pursued college students to help fill technology roles.

Per its careers site, the bank currently has more than 1,500 technology-related job openings and is looking for 42 potential hires to fill cybersecurity-specific roles. Responsibilities for cybersecurity analyst positions include producing threat evaluation reports, working with cyber threat defense operations to understand defensive posture, and reviewing existing processes to mitigate risk for the bank, according to the company’s job description.

Cybersecurity continues to be an ongoing focus across financial institutions.

“By converging compliance and security functions as a joint risk management capability, enterprises attain both proactive and reactive capabilities necessary to defend against and respond to cyberattacks,” Igor Volovich, vice president of compliance strategy at cybersecurity firm Qmulos, previously told BAN.

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