Exclusive Networks Looking To Address Cybersecurity Talent Shortage With CyberFarm

Exclusive Networks marked its 100th participant in its CyberFarm program, a hands-on talent incubation initiative launched in 2022 with Cal Poly SLO to address the cybersecurity skills shortage by providing paid, real-world experience and delivering pre-qualified talent to solution providers and vendors.

Global cybersecurity and secure networking distributor and services aggregator Exclusive Networks, which is taking direct aim at the persistent challenges of a cybersecurity talent shortage with its Exclusive Networks CyberFarm program for training college students for jobs in this field, has just onboarded its 100th student.

The CyberFarm program of Boulogne-Billancourt, France-based Exclusive Networks is a structured, immersive workforce development initiative designed to help solution providers and vendors build skilled talent pipelines without absorbing all the risk themselves, said Jason Beal, president of Exclusive Networks’ North American business.

CyberFarm was launched in 2022 as an internal talent incubator on the campus of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Its expansion comes as nearly 40 percent of North American tech companies cite shortages in skilled workers, particularly in cybersecurity, cloud, and AI, as a major threat to business success, Beal told CRN, citing a GTIA study.

Cybersecurity is a huge business with a global total addressable market of over 6 billion euros, or over $7 billion, with the vast majority going through indirect channels, Beal said.

However, he said, the cybersecurity industry in the U.S. faces a severe talent shortage, especially for smaller channel partners.

“You hear a lot of talk about the shortage of talent in our industry, particularly around cybersecurity,” he said. “Exclusive Networks North America is actually doing something about it. We’re incubating and developing talent on a major university campus. Students in CyberFarm aren’t interns or apprentices. They’re working with us 20 hours a week and getting paid, typically, and then we help them after graduation. We may hire them. Some of the vendors with whom we work are hiring the students. And a lot of our channel partners now hiring them. So Exclusive Networks CyberFarm truly is a solution for this global talent shortage. We are incubating and developing and in that next generation of talent for the industry.”

CyberFarm’s location on the campus of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo is no coincidence, said Beal (pictured above). The relationship with Cal Poly started in 2022 with Beal’s predecessor.

“He was an alumnus from Cal Poly and wanted to give back and do something with the campus to help try to solve the talent shortage and give students an opportunity,” he said. “CyberFarm started in 2022 and it’s expanded to support the recruitment training needs of our VARs, our solution providers, of Exclusive Networks, and of our vendors. So each year the program just keeps getting bigger.”

CyberFarm, which has an office on campus with on-site human resources and business management, typically has about two dozen students in the program for roughly two years, Beal said.

“They’ll typically do their junior and senior year,” he said. “Some may continue to work if they come back to Cal Poly and do a master’s program. We’ve just onboarded our 100th student. This is a big milestone for us to hit 100 students that have come through the program and have gone to work in the industry.”

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s engineering program ranks amongst the best in North America, and the university also has a really strong business school, Beal said.

“We have great relationships with the professors, a lot of them in computer engineering and computer science, and so we often get the best talent recommended,” he said. “We’re one of the quote, unquote, ‘hottest’ jobs on campus. But to be fair, we have all different functions within our business that students are working in not only engineering and pre-sales and post-sales engineering, but also in business development reps, marketing, operations, customer success, and finance. We are pulling great students who are majoring in different subjects at Cal Poly.”

Exclusive Networks is looking to get more solution providers to look at CyberFarm as a way to find trained cybersecurity talent, Beal said.

“As our business is growing, as our portfolio of vendors is growing, we’re seeing their interest in having students work both while they’re still going to school and after,” he said. “So we’re growing the CyberFarm. And we’re getting the word out to more and more partners, and now we’re seeing more and more partners who have interest in CyberFarm and the different functions students are training on. We’re seeing more sales, more engineering, and more on the marketing side. Partners need a lot of help around marketing. We’re starting to see our partners use some of the students to do their websites and their social media.”

For Datalink Networks, CyberFarm has already become a very helpful program for finding talent, said Don Wisdom, founder and president of the Santa Clarita, Calif.-based MSP.

Wisdom told CRN he got to know Beal when Beal was at Barracuda Networks and helped Datalink Networks grow. Beal eventually invited Wisdom to have lunch with him at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and visit the Exclusive Networks on-campus office.

“We met about 12 to 15 students at the office, and we met the manager that runs the office, Danielle, and she was fantastic,” he said. “The office is beautiful, and I really like what they’re doing. They’re really connecting these bright, ambitious students, giving them a chance to do real work during their college years at a real job. So I applaud them for that. We need more of that in industry. And I think being physically situated on campus and then providing the ability to hire these students is incredibly valuable.”

After having lunch with a couple of the students, Wisdom eventually made a connection with one of them, Wisdom said.

“One of the very top student engineers, we ended up speaking with and liking, and he has now been working with us for about six months in our Bentonville, Arkansas office,” he said. “He’s great. We knew what we were getting before he joined us.”

An MSP or IT service company typically uses tools like Indeed or LinkedIn for recruiting, and those are viable options, Wisdom said.

“But the other way to do it is with the people at Exclusive,” he said. “We have someone in Danielle who can direct us to the top students, and we can hire them as interns. And if they work out well, we can offer them full-time employment. If you end up not liking a new employee, you have to get rid of them. It’s much easier to work with Exclusive because we essentially get a recruiting consultant for free.”

Working with the Exclusive Networks CyberFarm, an MSP gets two different kinds of new hire filtering, Wisdom said.

“If you’re talking to a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, you’re talking to someone that worked really hard as a student and has a record of accomplishment just to get there,” he said. “And then you combine that with a record that you get to see if you want when hiring them as interns that it would otherwise be impossible to do without the office there because you have that oversight and someone who’s more senior than them to talk to who is in effect their manager.”

In addition to Datalink Networks’ first hire from CyberFarm, the MSP is now engaging with the organization on a marketing intern who is also doing great working with the company’s marketing manager, Wisdom said.

“And we’re also looking now at bringing in another couple of people full-time as business development reps, either juniors or seniors at Cal Poly,” he said. “The juniors and first semester seniors qualify under the intern program, and then we can make them offers when they graduate.”

Wisdom said he can’t think of any other vendors with a program like CyberFarm.

“This is something that’s really needed,” he said. “We have a rapidly evolving youth culture here by design. The managed service industry has really aged. I’ve been in it for over three decades. And I think, like a lot of MSPs and business owners, this youth movement has spurred a lot of interest in hiring kids right out of college. The advantage there is you get to bring someone in at a lower cost than if you hired someone with industry experience, and you generally get a pretty loyal employee base because we bring them in, give them competitive pay, and then as a growing company we can advance them rapidly because we have needs that have to be filled. The downside is, you don’t get experienced people. You have to build that experience. But the upside is, you get a lot of energy. They’re a lot of fun to work with. They keep the older generation, I would say, a little bit younger.”