Frank Cicio is the founder of iQ4 a for-profit company that currently provides structured cybersecurity courses to colleges and universities that feature 1) an industry virtual mentor provided by the company from a large pool of corporate volunteers and 2) an e-portfolio of skills tied to the industry/national standards that is called a passport. These courses can be real-world or entirely virtual and can be semester-long or 4-week where they operate either as non-credit stand alone or as part of an existing credit-bearing course like a laboratory. The company’s track record with students is that this experience is powerful, galvanizing, and leads to employment after graduation (or real-world internships for current students). It also plugs a skills-gap in a key enterprise where recruiting for jobs is a corporate problem. This podcast reviews the founding, ongoing implementation, and future plans for other areas (e.g. data science).
Topics discussed in this episode include:
Resources Discussed in this Episode:
Music Credits: C’est La Vie by Derek Clegg
ExperiencED Season 1, Episode 4
Jim Stellar: [00:00:00] Welcome to the ExperiencED podcast. I am Jim Stellar.
[00:00:12] Mary Churchill: [00:00:12] I am Mary Churchill
[00:00:13] Adrienne Dooley: [00:00:13] and I'm Adrienne Dooley
[00:00:15] Jim Stellar: [00:00:15] We bring you this podcast on experiential education
[00:00:18] Mary Churchill: [00:00:18] with educators and thought leaders
[00:00:20] Adrienne Dooley: [00:00:20] from around the country and the world.
[00:00:24] Jim Stellar: [00:00:24] We are pleased today to have a chance to interview Frank Cicio, founder of iQ4, a virtual internship company that has started with the field of cybersecurity, features online industry mentors in virtual classroom-based courses, documents key skills and abilities according to national standards, and helps bridge the employment gap between industry and education. They have had enough students go through their courses so far that they know employment is high, and so are salaries. Through their courses a high proportion of women are entering the field and the company is helping industry, finding talent by building it, not buying it in the normal hiring cycle.
[00:01:08] Mary Churchill: [00:01:08] So great to meet you.
[00:01:10] Frank Cicio: [00:01:10] Same here.
[00:01:11] Mary Churchill: [00:01:11] And Jim's told me a lot about you. So I'm excited about this conversation and I will admit that I recommended we go with someone who was outside of academia.
[00:01:25] Frank Cicio: [00:01:25] Okay. So tell me about it. What is it that you're doing? Give me a little context.
[00:01:28] Mary Churchill: [00:01:28] For the podcast?
[00:01:31] Frank Cicio: [00:01:31] Yeah.
[00:01:31] Mary Churchill: [00:01:31] It's all about experiential education. So I'm a sociologist by training, and Jim is, you know, biology, neuroscience, and we have a colleague, Adrienne, who's a practitioner in the education space. So part of what we're trying to do is tell the story of how important experiential education is, not just to future careers, right? Of course, we know it gives you great skills for your future job or your current job, but also people skills, the human skills, but ultimately, makes it a better world for all of us. If you've got this experiential ed as part of your academic program, so that you're gaining those skills along the way. All three of us either went to school or worked or did both at Northeastern. So we have that Northeastern connection - it's where we met. So, and it sounds like the work that you and Jim have been doing together is right in that wheelhouse. And I worked with Jim for a short time at Queens College CUNY. So, met a lot of those players, great schools, really doing great work. So, yeah. So, do you want to jump right in?
[00:02:44] Frank Cicio: [00:02:44] Sure. I got a little bit better idea of what you're doing.
[00:02:47] Mary Churchill: [00:02:47] Yeah. And I can say that most of the folks who are listening are in higher ed, right? So we're, some of them are strong supporters of experiential ed and they're knee deep in it, but some people need to be convinced of why this is important work. So that's part of what we're doing as well.
[00:03:07] Frank Cicio: [00:03:07] Okay. Cool. Let's go.
[00:03:09] Mary Churchill: [00:03:09] Okay, so this idea of founding iQ4, right, this virtual internship company, what gave you the idea to do that and how did the company get started and why did you pick cyber security as one of your first initiatives?
[00:03:26] Frank Cicio: [00:03:26] A great questions, so thank you, Mary. I think, I would first start with, we didn't start the company with the intention as most companies when they first started out, think we're going in one direction and we end up in another as we explore and try to solve a problem. The genesis of the company was based on trying to solve a skills gap problem in general. And from taking that on - and our background is solving problems with technology. We've done it mostly for Wall Street over the last 20 years, mostly technology infrastructure. So when we looked at the skills piece, we said, you know, why? Why don't we know the right talent inside of a firm? So this is where it started, inside of the enterprise, to be able to fill the jobs that we need, either jobs that are well-defined or even new talent/skills that are required for new business that we're developing. So, as we started to explore that, we realized that we started following kind of like the yellow brick road. And what that led us to, was outside the organization to where things start within the schools, right? And what we realized was there was no technology that underpinned this notion of lifelong learning. There was no technology that existed that really described or facilitated a supply chain for intellectual capital, people, skills, what they develop, how they're measured, different ways they're measured, how they progress and do it in a validated way. So we basically built a platform to facilitate that. One of the parts of that platform is the academic side where we realized that there's a gap between education and industry in many areas. One is there's no real technology that just facilitates a transparency for industry to gain access to students, kind of like a learning management system, except for workforce learning, right?
[00:05:41] You've got the learning systems inside the schools. We don't have the learning systems between the schools and the enterprise. So we built a module on this supply chain to facilitate that, to create that ubiquity. And we translated what we built to what people would you know, kind of refer to or, have a relationship, a relationship with not a relationship, a, that people would have an association with like internships and apprenticeships except it's virtual. So when you suddenly turn things virtual - think about what Amazon did to the merchandising world, right? We went from going to the store to buy something to a multi hundred trillion dollar business now online. It disrupted the whole industry. Well, when you, you're enable technology to do that between students and the workplace, I really believe you can disrupt, in a big way and solve that problem with the skills gap. So, the trick was how do you coexist with academia and the business that they run. And how do you enable organizations to engage with students in a very powerful, financially beneficial and way where it doesn't take them a lot of time? So, because that's industry, right? So we built that.
[00:07:16] Mary Churchill: [00:07:16] Would you call that a platform?
[00:07:19] Frank Cicio: [00:07:19] Oh, yes, yes. We built the platform, a workforce development platform basically. Yes. So it's a learning system like you have internally for your classes, except think about it now that instead of instructors who have mentors, right? They're the instructors. The content is interactive because it's actually a project. The project has teams, so we work with teams of students instead of individual students. We assess how well they apply their knowledge versus taking a test. So it's all about representing how a student would actually work in the real world without actually being hired yet. So we create that transparency. And why is that important? Because we felt in our early days, the genesis of the company, when we started looking at this, we actually were working with NASA on aerospace engineering and STEM, and we realized that the most powerful way of engaging a mind is putting it to work on a real problem with real people, to understand that space, the subject matter experts. So when you engage bright minds or anybody with a mind, because we believe everybody has great minds, we believe that it's important to give them a chance to apply it. So if you actually apply it on something real, where somebody sees something, they can ask a question, they actually have a challenge, there's a strategy behind it, they're working with a team, it suddenly changes the landscape and the behavior of people, students in particular. So we believe this project-based learning was the way to go. You could call it applied learning, experiential learning. It's basically project-based learning. And so that's what we did. We built a platform to enable that.
[00:09:13] Mary Churchill: [00:09:13] And that's where the virtual industry mentorship happens, correct?
[00:09:18] Frank Cicio: [00:09:18] Yes, yes. So the actual, so just the day in the life. And let me give you an idea. In cyber security, for example, I'll take you through the process there. So we selected cyber because while. STEM was really important and engineering in particular, and how the country was losing our position and leadership in that space. It was more of an economic issue and in that vein, as opposed to cyber security, which was a nation-state issue, right? So the threat to nation-state, to our core assets of the country, whether it be our physical assets, our people. Where the bad guys could, you know, attack a heart pacer, right? They could just take them down. They could take down utilities and just take hospitals down. They could take lighting systems and water supplies. They can take, you can drive your car off the road. They can take money out of the bank without having to walk in. That's a big threat. That's much bigger than a manufacturing or retail shortage of supply of talent. So we took that on and you know, sometimes you don't know what you're asking for until you get it.
[00:10:32] Mary Churchill: [00:10:32] What you're getting into to!
[00:10:34] Frank Cicio: [00:10:34] Exactly. And we found ourselves in the middle of a hornet's nest that people didn't even know the kind of skills they needed because the bad guys were attacking systems and they had no idea even how to deal with it. So we were in the middle of a war that we - kind of right in 2015 - and not that it's just gone on in 2015 but it really, the bad guys really started realizing there's this enormous reservoir of things they can do that basically anything connected is vulnerable.
[00:11:15] Mary Churchill: [00:11:15] Right.
[00:11:16] Frank Cicio: [00:11:16] And so that's as kid in the candy store for the bad guys. So, we took this on. We engaged industry directly - specifically the cyber security leadership in Wall Street. So we formed a consortia with CUNY, with the vice chancellor at the time, Frank Sanchez. We actually, we got to Frank from Jim Stellar. Jim was the provost of Queens College at the time. I was introduced to Jim. Jim said, there's a guy you gotta meet. I asked Frank if he would be willing to support it. I'd bring industry to the table. So he agreed and we formed the Cybersecurity Workforce Alliance. These were folks like Phil Venables, this chief information security officer at Goldman, and his counterparts at Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase and the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.
[00:12:11] Mary Churchill: [00:12:11] Excellent.
[00:12:12] Frank Cicio: [00:12:12] All who had an interest, because we had hundreds of thousands of jobs open at the time. So we had this platform and they said, okay. We'll give you the content. We know what that content is. We'll write it up for you. We'll write a real project on insider threat, and we'll come up with an alias bank, which they called the Goliath National Bank. It was a multinational, 160,000 person bank that we used as a kind of like an example, a real live example wasn't real, but it was as real as they get.
[00:12:49] Mary Churchill: [00:12:49] Like a simulation, right?
[00:12:50] Frank Cicio: [00:12:50] Exactly. It was a simulation. They created the use cases like espionage and IP theft and intellectual property theft and other things that were going on. We utilized a framework because we knew the taxonomy was very key to measure the results of how well students applied their knowledge. So there's a whole component in terms of assessing applied knowledge that we want it to do it in a systematic way that could provide scale and measurability for the workforce that the workplace needs that, right? The organizations, when they invest. What am I getting out of it? What do I got to put into it? You know and, and that kind of thing.
[00:13:32] Mary Churchill: [00:13:32] And is this the - I'm looking at my notes - is this the skills documentation in the IQ4 passport? Yeah. Okay. So this is excellent.
[00:13:44] Frank Cicio: [00:13:44] Yep. So underlying that skills passport, underlying the whole platform, think about it - when you have a supply chain, when you go online with Amazon to buy something, you type in some keywords and something comes up. That data is coming from a barcode. That barcode has a taxonomy behind it. Because that common taxonomy - people don't know, a lot of people don't know this, but that barcode - whether it's a mouse pad, a blouse, a desk, a car, whatever it is - it has an associated digital identity. And that digital identity has all kinds of data and it needed to be, needed a common ontology that everybody reading that barcode was reading the same thing. And that's how the supply chain works. So we built that for people. We built a taxonomy. We utilized and worked with the Department of Homeland, the NSA. The Department of Defense had built a framework to start that was excellent for the federal government, which has now recently been adopted by the president's executive order that's mandated that the government needs, you know, must use that taxonomy now in all their federal agencies. We used it to adopt it to the private sector. So I co-chair the workforce group for the private sector for the NICE framework. It's a big initiative going on now with potentially the country could adopt that for all different disciplines beyond, so data science and finance and liberal arts, and you name it. It could become a core framework - open source, but everybody could talk the same language. So if you're an employer looking for something, you use that.
[00:15:32] Mary Churchill: [00:15:32] That's excellent. So you could basically, you could scan me and all of the metadata where I'm tagged, the skills I have would come up, correct?
[00:15:43] Frank Cicio: [00:15:43] Yep.
[00:15:44] Mary Churchill: [00:15:44] Awesome. That's very cool.
[00:15:47] Frank Cicio: [00:15:47] We actually built a, what I call, and I know the viewers or the listeners may take a little bit back on this, but we've invented the human barcode. We actually, we have a patent on it right now pending, and it is the coolest thing. It's in a T shape and the bars represent competencies and skills and then connected to that are all your work product: classes, courses you've taken, degrees, you've gotten, certifications, work product. So it's basically your DNA.
[00:16:18] Mary Churchill: [00:16:18] Yeah. Right. It's like your transcript and your LinkedIn profile and your CV or resume, all kind of in one, nice barcode.
[00:16:27] Frank Cicio: [00:16:27] That's right.
[00:16:28] Mary Churchill: [00:16:28] Yeah. No, that's brilliant.
[00:16:30] Frank Cicio: [00:16:30] That was a piece we saw that was missing - the notion of what we call the passport, right? Which is the barcode, next generation digital resume.
[00:16:39] Mary Churchill: [00:16:39] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:16:40] Frank Cicio: [00:16:40] Right. That was missing. The ability for applied knowledge was missing from a technology perspective. Plenty of different initiatives going on. You know, we didn't read, we didn't invent the notion of apprenticeships and internships. But we automated it because if you look at 21 million students in the United States and postsecondary school, how many are engaged in an apprenticeship or an internship? Right? Right? 2%. Yeah. There's no reason why 100% can't.
[00:17:13] Mary Churchill: [00:17:13] Exactly.
[00:17:14] Frank Cicio: [00:17:14] If you are the employer - you know, JP Morgan has 280,000 people working in the company, Accenture has 650,000 people in the company. Yum brands has 1.4 million people in the company, right? Just imagine if you can get a one to ten - one mentor for every 10 students, seven students -how you can instantly turn, you know, 21 million students divided by seven is what, 3 million?
[00:17:44] Mary Churchill: [00:17:44] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:17:45] Frank Cicio: [00:17:45] You only need about 40 companies light up to be a mentor, and there you go. You just gave 21 million students experience and awareness of opportunities in the market they never knew about.
[00:17:58] Mary Churchill: [00:17:58] That is fantastic. No, I think that we're not - in academia particularly, we're not utilizing really current technology at all. I mean, we're so far behind and you know, we kind of make these baby steps in online learning and we stick them in the same exact routine that we've always done everything for a hundred plus years. So, and I think platform is the way to go, right? And so if you can take an existing framework in academia, like a learning management system and connect into that and, bring us up to date, I think that's fantastic. So how
[00:18:44] Frank Cicio: [00:18:44] And that's what we've done, by the way. So we have packaged the applied learning program in a way that can fit within a three credit course structure. It can be plugged right into an elective. It could be plugged into it an existing apprenticeship or internship course. It could be a non-credit, it could be applied to freshmen as well as seniors or master’s degree students. It could be on, it's online, obviously. So you've got credited, non-credited. It can be a 30-day program. It can be a four-week, semester, full blown 14-week program. So we've configured the system in a way, the programs that they could just plug in and while it's highly disruptive, be totally complimentary to how a school operates
[00:19:41] Mary Churchill: [00:19:41] So that's fascinating because I have done a lot of corporate partnerships in my time in academia and, it's tough, right? Because academia, as I just described it, is pretty traditional and inflexible, and often the corporate partners get very frustrated with that. So how have you, what do you think has helped you be successful in accommodating these traditional rigid, frameworks within higher ed?
[00:20:13] Frank Cicio: [00:20:13] We bypass everything.
[00:20:16] Mary Churchill: [00:20:16] But you're also, I mean, you've kind of, you just said you have non-credit, you have three credit, you have four credit. You have - it's almost like molding clay around the current structure. You've been able to be so flexible that you fit yourself right into everything, correct? That's what it sounds like to me.
[00:20:35] Frank Cicio: [00:20:35] Yeah. So what we did was we created an environment where the platform facilitates mentors through the platform itself, plus video conferencing, like Zoom or WebEx - we use everything - to engage the students, right? So, the bottom line is whether the students are physically in a class or at their dorm or at their home or wherever they may be at work and taking an hour to go through this, they can engage with the mentor. They engage with the mentor on a project team. So these are all team-based. We do nothing individual. Okay. So we're trying to teach students the - primarily upfront - the soft skills, right? What are the, what we call power skills. So, how do you work as a team? How do you work and depend on each other and pull your own weight to make sure that the team generates what they need to? Because that's the real world when you get out there and in a market and the business side. So that part is what we had focused on.
[00:21:36] Then how we deliver it became the question. So we said to the school, look, you don't have to make this part of your curriculum at all. You can just promote it to the students, say it's available, and let them, you know, let them jump on it if they like. That's the least intrusive, right? Then if you want, you could actually plug it into an existing core shell so you don't have to get approval for the curriculum, you don't have to go to, it's not part of a curriculum, it's a soft skills, project-based course. Okay. So the school's welcomed anybody who could help their students with soft skills, right, because they're not really focused on as much. They could publish the course in the catalog because it's absolutely a bonafide course. And the students in some schools, they want to give the students the credit, right? So the students get credit. Most of the credits are three credit courses because they're an hour a week. There are actually two hours, one with the mentors, one with the, either the faculty or whoever. We've actually had our own people sit in, like, we do it at SUNY, sit in as adjuncts and they're validated adjuncts. They've gone through that process that you guys go through to bring in folks, and it's all virtual. So we don't physically arrive anywhere. And then sometimes the schools have their own faculty that they want to plug in. I mean, the best case would be faculty, whether they're cybersecurity smart or not. We actually prefer the soft skills part. So we have faculty that are really interested in helping students learn how to communicate, present, articulate, write, and actually apply and understand what the business needs, the better, and we could plug them in. So, and then, we have a battery of courses. So if the school actually wants to promote it as a simple gen ed course to gain awareness, they can, okay. If they want to promote it as a full blown apprentice course, whether it's a battery of courses that the school provides, actual academic training, right? Education courses. And we can package that with the projects. We can do that.
[00:23:55] Mary Churchill: [00:23:55] So you provide the schools with a menu of options and so they have agency in choosing how they partner with you and how that is to their students. But it sounds like you're also, and this was the bypass piece, you're going directly to the students and kind of that high level of engagement where the students are very, very interested in the work they're doing. And so they come up, they show up and they know they're learning. Very, very smart. Well, the menu piece is really important. I think when I'm working with faculty, the more I try to fit, you know, the square peg in the round hole, it does not work. But if I say, here are all these options to opt into, they're going to choose something 99% of the time. So it's about having agency having choice and not forcing one model. And so the menu of models is a fantastic approach, strategy.
[00:25:00] This is lovely. I mean, I think I've learned so much and you've got a really great model, but you also, and I don't know if this is you personally or the folks you work with, but you're flexible, right? And I think that helps with academia because I think most of us in higher ed want our students to have these skills and we want them to be successful in life, but we don't always know how to work with corporate partners. And there's definitely a fear. I think there's a fear for many faculty, of what does that look like. So I think the more we can demystify that, the better for all of us, right? So is there anything else you want to add.
[00:25:43] Frank Cicio: [00:25:43] Well, I think that that's phase one. Phase two becomes how do you scale this within the schools themselves and what kind of a role besides just making it available to the student, right? So that gets down into the employers and, you know, at the end of the day, if you look at a, a SUNY, Albany, you probably have 20,000 students roughly give or take. You probably have thousands of companies that over time have recruited your students and you know, they come in and they do their thing and the students, it's up to the students to try to figure out who's the right employer and all that good stuff. Your career services folks are inundated and understaffed to be able to really deal with 20,000 students and thousands of employers, just that it won't work. So what we're trying to do now is say, look. You have established a relationship. It's all about ecosystem, right? And optimizing ecosystems. So our next step is you've asked, you've optimized, you've established an ecosystem and a relationship with employers. Why don't you make it much more profound and a value for them to work with you on a new program, right? Help benefit the students. You want them to hire your students. Ultimately, we'd love to have them stay in the New York area so we could drive our own economy, right? So by going out and making these introductions, that's all that needs to be done. It's an email to an employer. It says we've got a new program, would love to know if you'd have any interest in it. Bang. Done. Hand it over to iQ4, we'll take it from there. And, the same with the employers that we're working with. All they need to do now, is send an email to the provost or somebody in the school and say, look, we're looking to hire your students, got a new program, it’s all virtual. We'd like to plug in and work with your students. Literally. It's like Amazon. It's like LinkedIn. All right. How do you engage with the social networks? How do you engage with these online systems? You log in, you set up a new password and a new username, and you're in. Well, there should be no reason we can't do that for students for applied learning experience or learning, right? We could get it to that point. We're there, actually. So we think that what's really important, and there's a whole financial model behind it, Mary, right? So we've got a model. We've launched this new program called the virtual apprenticeship challenge, and it's kind of focused right now on cybersecurity and data science. We're looking to bring 10,000 students through the program over the next three years on a global basis. And the way the program works is, in some cases the schools put a little coin in. We want the schools to put some- kind of like the cost of a lab fee, right - for students to participate, the cost of a book, because it's important to get their attention, right? If you give it away for free, nobody takes it serious. So, but we don't want to price this thing out because you know, it does cost money to develop the technology, to run the programs, to work with the mentor. You could imagine and the content. Now on the other hand, employers spend an enormous amount of money finding and hiring. That number can range from $75,000 to $175,000 per student to find them, hire them and give them three month’s worth of training. Okay. So what our model is, is look for $2,000 you can sponsor a student. So if you sponsor a team of seven for $15,000 you now have seven students that absolutely one or two of them you can hire.
[00:29:52] Okay? And you've just saved yourself 10 times that amount of money. You spent 10, 12 weeks with them. You know who they are, they know who you are, right? And you hire them. You've taken the risk, basically, out of the program. If that happens and the school finds those employers, those sponsors, we give back to the school 20% for every dollar. Give that back to the school to support self-sustainability of the program. We give it back to the school to support potential scholarships if they'd like for the students, and to basically continue the program in the operations so that we can help to fund a new way to engage the workforce and the work place and mobilize industry and education in a way that has never been done before. So that's the next phase that we're working on today.
[00:30:47] Mary Churchill: [00:30:47] That's fantastic. That's excellent. I'm sensitive to the time. I'm looking at the clock right now and I know we need to wrap this up, but that is. You've just blown my mind, quite honestly, because I, in several iterations of my past life, I have negotiated these corporate partnerships, right. And at places that were not Northeastern, they were very challenging and career services offices often wanted to participate in this, but they were understaffed, under-resourced, and were just barely staying above water, dealing with the major employers that came on a regular basis. But they knew that they needed to be doing so much more. So, and I think the platform model is the way to go for so many parts of our life lives right now. But, and I've said there's gotta be someone who could hook into career services and just really make this much simpler. And scale up at a greater level and the value add to the corporate sector and the value add to higher ed is so obvious. So thank you.
[00:32:01] Frank Cicio: [00:32:01] Well, and think about the school itself. It's not just career services. It's you. It's the team, the executive team. It's the faculty. Everybody's got relationships with some level or some employer that they work with. Employers call them, especially faculty, right? They're calling the faculty who are your best students, right? So this is a way to just say, ah, sign in here and you can find it, right? But that's what we're trying to do. We are trying to scale that whole point. That's part of the skill gap goes back to where we started, right? The skills gap exists because technology doesn't exist. So if we can bring technology to the table, we believe that standards, models, content, and the technology pulling it together we'll solve that problem in a big way.
[00:32:52] Mary Churchill: [00:32:52] Excellent. Well, thank you so much. And it was great to meet you.
[00:32:59] Thank you for listening. We hope you will come back soon for the next installation of ExperiencED
[00:33:05] Adrienne Dooley: [00:33:05] as we continue to talk about the neuroscience and sociology of enhancing higher education
[00:33:11] Jim Stellar: [00:33:11] by combining direct experience with classical academic learning.