Security Training in the Spotlight: Prepping for the NCMS Seminar

Hi, this is Lindy Kyzer with ClearanceJobs.com, and welcome. I can tell that the conference season is heating back up and folks are excited to get back to in-person events. We’re excited today to be highlighting one of my favorite industry conferences. So if you’re in the security space, in the national security space, especially if you’re listening to this and you’re a facility security officer, cognitive security officer, or someone who has ever heard of the acronym NISPOM in any capacity or knows what it is, this is a great event for you. The NCMS Seminar is getting ready to kick off in June, and I’m really excited to have two folks who really know a lot about NCMS as a professional organization and also about that event. We have Lynn Burns, who is the President of NCMS and Sarah Turner, a member of the Board of Directors of NCMS.

I think professional organizations and associations have been really a great way for us to stay engaged as a community through COVID and now coming out of it. So I’m, again, excited to have them introduce this. If you’re not familiar with the organization, I think it’s a great time to get reintroduced. The security community is obviously one that we’re really passionate about at ClearanceJobs. It is certainly important now, as we see national news headlines highlighting security clearances everywhere and a lot of information and then a lot of misinformation or inaccurate information. So it’s good to know that there are folks who are working in the security community, that it is a fundamental and critical mission. You cannot have a classified program without a security officer to help manage that program. And again, professional associations like NCMS, really are out there to help educate and inform and inspire the security community and we really see that through NCMS.

Lindy, thank you for inviting us to be here today. Really appreciate the opportunity to talk about NCMS and what our mission is, and especially about our seminar that’s coming up.

So I know you’re gearing up for the annual seminar. So Sarah, I was hoping you could walk me through a little bit about what happens at the seminar and why this is a pinnacle event for the NCMS community?

Yeah. Hi, thanks, Lindy. We are gearing up for our annual seminar in just a few short weeks and we’re very excited. The seminar committee has been working tirelessly to bring what we hope NCMS attendees will find as one of our greatest seminars ever. I am excited to be the Vice Chair of the 59th Annual Seminar. It’s going to happen in New Orleans, Louisiana, June 6th through the 8th. We’ve got a great venue at both the New Orleans Marriott and the Sheraton and we have so much going on at the seminar. This year we have three Monday courses, including an NBIS live demo and question and answer session that’s being hosted by two of the leading NBIS industry professionals. We have a phenomenal eight-hour cybersecurity course taught by industry and DCSA subject matter experts, and we have the getting started for the new FSO course presented by CDSE. It’s a very unique opportunity because the NCMS Conference is the only place that individuals can take this seminar live and in-person.

Additionally, on Monday afternoon, we are proud to host the National Industrial Security Program Policy Advisory Committee, or the NISPPAC, at their open meeting. The NISPPAC is comprised of both government and industry representatives and is responsible for recommending changes in industrial security policy through modifications to Executive Order 12829, implementing its directives and the National Industrial Security Program operating manual. So we’re very excited to have the NISPPAC meeting at our event this year. We’re going to kick the seminar off Monday evening with a welcome reception, that’ll be held in the exhibit hall. Attendees can get together, network, share some drinks and food, and wander through the exhibit hall and find out what’s going on and what kind of products are out there for industrial security professionals.

And then officially on Tuesday, June 6th, the seminar starts in the morning with the general session. We’ve got some great keynote speakers all three days, including DCSA Director Bill Lietzau and Matthew Redding on Wednesday, followed by the presentation of the James S. Cogswell Award. The Cogswell Award, for those of you who don’t know, is the most prestigious honor that DCSA can bestow to clear industry. In addition to the general session and all the Monday activities, we’ll have a variety of workshops all three days in the afternoon, including workshops focused on professional development, program management and DCSA and industry updates. We’ll also have how-tos on preparing for an inspection, managing your insider threat program, building a positive security culture, scoping your environment for CMMC and COMSAT key distribution. We also have various workshops related to cybersecurity, FOCI security review process, and that’s just to name a few.

These workshops are taught by both government and industry subject matter experts, and if that weren’t enough, we have more help desks than ever before this year. We have professional development opportunities, including resume review by some top leaders in HR management, interview pointers and a professional photo lounge, so that folks can update their Outlook profiles to have their best face forward when they send out an email. We also have the exhibit hall and the vendor stage, and just so many networking opportunities. Registration is open, the seminar kicks off Tuesday morning and runs through Thursday afternoon. But like I said, we’ve got so much going on Monday morning and all day Monday, really for that matter, that you might just want to plan to arrive and take part in all of the pre-seminar fun Monday.

Whew. I’m tired just hearing you say it, Sarah, but it sounds amazing. The good thing it’s in New Orleans, I don’t think people sleep there anyway.

Yeah, right.

So I’ll go to the conference, I’m going to stay up the whole time, nonstop training, nonstop learning, it is. Having attended the conference, I will say it’s a very content rich seminar, there’s a lot going on. I love how you bring together the whole camp of security professionals because I think I deal a lot with the personnel security side of it, but NCMS is a great chance, you can really bring your whole team around that. So if there’s different elements to physical security, the cybersecurity, like you said, the personnel security piece of it, all of those different camps are kind of coming together and there’s content and different tracks that appeal to folks that are working across this industry, which I really love.

So talk a little bit again on that vein about the role of security professionals. Security clearances are in the news more than ever, and I kind of love that and kind of hate it. Obviously, I hate the reason for it, it’s always exciting to see people actually talking about our industry, but a lot of the information is not always accurate or positive. So the visibility is somewhat good. And I’d like to take the opportunity to highlight the security function. I do hope that hopefully, organizations are seeing the importance of security professionals and what they do. Do you think organizations are starting to see the value, even what we’re seeing in the news the past two weeks, but talk about the momentum about the security profession? Do you see even from the conference year over year, more interest in security professionals and this as a profession?

I’m going to put that one to Lynn. We do have a large number of attendees already and we’re still six weeks out. So we are hitting goals and I think that people are really starting to take notice of the importance of security professionals. But I’ll turn it over to Lynn.

So Lindy, it’s a great question. I do think the focus of security professionals has really got more attention in the last couple years, and a lot of that has to do with the cyber maturity model certification. When they came out with the guidance for that, a lot of companies said, “Well, that sounds like our security person’s job.” Not, it’s more of the CISO’s job but it really did help bring a lot of attention to security. Any company that does business with the Department of Defense has to have an FSO, if they’re processing security clearances or they’re protecting classified information. And those FSOs, they need training and NCMS is the best. I like to say, we’re the premier place to get that training. That’s our full purpose, is to provide training for security professionals. Companies are starting to recognize that. So in the past, a lot of companies would focus on the cost of the seminar and the cost of sending their person on travel for a week and the cost of having that person out of the office for a week.

And I do think that companies are starting to recognize the value of it. Every year, the number of people that attend our seminars goes up and up. This year, I think we’re probably going to hit 1,500 people at our seminar, and that will be, I think probably a record for any seminar that we’ve had in the last 10 years. I do think that there’s a lot of focus on security that, like you said, the items in the news, that brings a negative focus on us. But I think just because of the way things are changing in government regulations and in the way that companies have to, as I said, with the cyber maturity model, respond to those regulations, I think we are seeing a resurgence in security focus.

I’ll bring up and seeing the focus on that and I do think that there has been a push that’s even just been over the past several years in saying, “Hey, this is important to companies.” Bottom line, security needs to be invested in all of that. And that’s even coming out of a few sessions that I heard at NCMS last year, were focusing on, who does security need to bring in? And increasingly it is the C-suite, presidents and CEOs, they want to know what’s going on in security. You can’t really stovepipe those functions anymore. And there’s a lot of value for companies and organizations to bring their professionals out to something like the NCMS seminar to say, “Hey, this is a chance to get to know other folks in the industry, to see what’s going on out there and to make your training programs more robust.”

Because companies do have insider threat training requirements, and a lot of emphasis on that I think, is going to be, just the heat is going to be turned up even more. So, investing some in your talent and in your security office right now, seems like definitely a good move. Along that vein, professional development has definitely been a big push in NCMS in the past few years, I’ve seen mentorship, you mentioned the professional development, training opportunities even that will be at the seminar. Why is NCMS focusing on professional development and mentorship for security professionals?

Definitely focusing on professional development. As you know, there is the great resignation. We do unfortunately, have an aging workforce and we’re trying to get more people spun up and excited to take on these roles in security, be it personnel security or cybersecurity, what have you. NCMS is really pushing professional development, not only with the mentee, mentor relationship avenue that we pursue, but also through the NCMS communities page called the HUB. The HUB is a really great resource where members can collaborate, ask questions, run ideas through each other, and connect with other like-minded security professionals. We have various communities including general FSO, ISSM, the seminar has its own community. We have an academia community, COMSET community, CUI, controlled unclassified information, FOCI, insider threat, NIST systems that includes DISS and eventually, NBIS and NIST and DISS.

All of those systems that our industrial partners use for their job. We also have a security consulting community, these are just to name a few. Recently, we added a community for our Department of Energy partners, so that they can join in and collaborate on their customer and their trials and tribulations with DOE. In addition to the HUB, I’m really excited to announce that we are working a professional development effort that will encompass much more than just mentorship. Our vision is to prepare security professionals for the next level of their career, be it moving up to a manager role or maybe doing a lateral, going from PERSEC to physical or “I’ve tried all of these things in industrial security. I really like to make the move over to cyber.”

That’s kind of what we’re going to focus on and get these folks ready and excited for the next step in their career because Lynn and I aren’t going to be hopefully, be in the workforce forever. And when the time comes for us to step on and move out, we would like someone to take over the reins, and that’s not going to happen if they don’t have the proper training or the proper guidance. So we’ve got a new generation coming in ready to take the wheel, and we really want to focus on keeping them in industrial security, and we hope to be able to guide them on that journey through the professional development aspect of NCMS.

I love that. I mean, that gets me really excited for what you guys are doing and the value of NCMS, from just the broader focus of this industry, because we just see that, we did our annual state of the FSO survey that we do at ClearanceJobs. It’s good because there’s a lot of experience in the security profession, but that’s one thing that we saw, is the graying in the workforce. We had more respondents in the higher end and fewer on the lower end. And then the up-skilling and re-skilling piece of it is key because we have huge groups coming out maybe of the military that have some kind of slice of this, but how do they really pivot it or grow a career in it?

So being able to show them the path of a security professional and how you can start and build and grow, take lateral assignments, do different things, keep the field interesting. I think that’s a great focus, and I think it’s going to provide a lot of value, not just to the security community, but what we’re all doing in national security overall. Because as Lynn talked to earlier, you can’t have a classified program without an FSO to manage those DOD programs. So we really need to focus on this, defense budgets are going up, I see, so we need to invest in security too to go along with it. On that vein, those are my only questions. Are there any other things that you wanted to go over or highlight about either NCMS, the seminar or other things that are going on?

You mentioned people coming out of the military. I wanted to grab that thread for a moment. We are developing what we’re calling, a mili-mentoring, and it’s a program where people coming out of the military, if they’re interested in security, we’re going to mentor them through NCMS and then try to give them contacts with companies that may hire them based on the training that they’ve received from NCMS. So we’ve been about six months or a year trying to put all the pieces of that together, and I think we’re getting close to rolling that out. So I’m really excited about that because it’s going to allow us to give back to the military and help them to steer a profession after they get out of the service.

Awesome. Fantastic. Well, you heard it here, Classmgmt.com is where we need to go. Check it out, learn more about NCMS or learn more about the seminar, and as Sarah said, there’s still time to register, sign up and come find us all in New Orleans.