LSUA, LSUS and Ingalls Information Security Collaborate to Grow the Cyber Workforce in Louisiana
October 09, 2023
Building Talent Pipelines with Industry
Ingalls Information Security, a cybersecurity services provider based in Central Louisiana, has partnered with LSU Alexandria and LSU Shreveport to educate and train homegrown talent and build cybersecurity business in and for the state.
Ingalls, LSUA and LSUS are now two years into a formalized internship program to strengthen cybersecurity talent pipelines in Louisiana. Cohorts of up to four students at a time can receive course credit while working as tier-one cybersecurity analysts at Ingalls and helping banks, insurance companies, hospitals and other businesses secure their networks and data.
Some students immediately transition from interns to employees. Ingalls almost exclusively hires current and former interns to work as tier-one analysts. One of them is Aiden Thaxton from Pineville, Louisiana, who is working full-time for Ingalls while finishing his bachelor’s degree at LSUA. He will be one of the very first LSUA students to graduate with a degree in cybersecurity—a program added this year, with 10 new cybersecurity courses.
“I’ve worked for Ingalls for over a year now. My studies support the stuff I do at work, and vice versa. It fits perfectly,” Thaxton said. “I’m not certified for this job. I haven’t graduated college. No company would have looked at me if it wasn’t for the LSUA internship program and the experience I gained. It got me to where I needed to be to land a job.”
With support from Louisiana Economic Development, LSU Alexandria is building out its Technovation Center and a cyber lab for hands-on training.
“As a growing company, we weren’t finding enough people in Louisiana with experience in data breach response. We had a scalability problem we needed to solve. So, we decided to tackle that, and that led us to a partnership with LSU.”
Jason Ingalls, CEO of Ingalls Information Security