Bay Area Community College Consortium

​​Bay Area Community College Consortium
July 2018

​​"The Bay Area Cyber Competitions program is designed to educate our community to the importance of cybersecurity in everyday lives. Our vision is at least to teach students to be cyber aware and safe users of technology; at best to begin training to become the next cybersecurity professionals."

- Irvin Lemus and Richard Grotegut

Established in 2016, the Bay Area Cyber Competitions consortium is the collaborative effort of over 20 colleges across the San Francisco Bay Area region. The consortium's goal is to develop pathways to success in cybersecurity for our K-12 students. Our focus is building ethical, technical, and soft skills through the AFA's CyberPatriot national cyber defense competition, CyberCamps and more.

The consortium's mission is to facilitate the pathway between K-12 students, community colleges and industry. We promote cybersecurity education through online training, classroom visits, career fairs, community outreach, summer CyberCamps and hosting K-12 students at our colleges and industry offices for CyberPatriot training, workshops and competitions.

The consortium's region is serviced with industry, faculty, and community college student mentors who give K-12 students a first-hand experience in various IT concepts, as well as tangible connections whereby the students can see themselves studying cyber security or working in the field in the near future. Through the Western Academy Support and Training Center (https://www.wastc.org), the consortium provides professional development for all participating teachers, college students, parents, and community partners to become coaches, mentors, or active supporters developing their cybersecurity skills. We are proudly partnered with San Jose-based Cisco Systems Inc. as our main industry contact.  Cisco has provided our consortium with venues, support, training and advisement.

Throughout the program, students are given the opportunity to pursue their education with any of the consortium's partner colleges where they can earn Associate degrees, Certificates of Achievement, and take technical certification classes - leading to CompTIA, Cisco, VMware, PaloAlto Networks, EMC, RedHat, any many other certifications.

The Bay Area Cyber Competitions consortium is located in the heart of Silicon Valley.  We strive to make our region's K-12 students have every opportunity to engage with the very companies that make their home in our region.

For more information on BACCC visit http://baccc.net/​.