NGA gives high school students top-secret clearances, boosting cyber talent pipeline

“Hook ’em early.” That’s the mantra for Gary Buchanan, chief information security officer of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, on how to bolster the cyber workforce at his agency.

But he’s not talking about college interns. NGA has created a program to hire high school students as interns and give them top-secret security clearances to work on mission-critical work like cybersecurity to bolster the talent pipeline, Buchanan said during a panel at Scoop News Group’s Cybertalks last week.

“We’re talking about young men and women who were 16 years old, juniors or seniors in high school, that we gave a top secret SCI clearance to,” he said, adding it was the first time in his career that he’d seen this.

Buchanan’s cybersecurity office in particular had nine summer high school interns, but the agency had other students spread across other functions as well.

NGA recently closed applications for next summer’s cohort, which was open to students 16 years and older who could be brought in on an entry-level salary of $21,398 – $69,035. These students will be asked to “perform a variety of entry-level functions and tasks in support of the organization to which they are assigned” and accomplish “a work project that involves problem identification, analysis, and resolution.”

As Buchanan’s mantra suggests, the hope is this early work will help direct the young students to future careers in cybersecurity or other critical government functions.

“And these young men and women, you know, what do you expect them to know as a high school student? I was floored,” Buchanan said of the last cohort. “It gave me hope in the future. And we expose these young men and women to the sexier parts of cyber. And that was not, you know, writing paperwork. It was: Hey, this is how you do a phishing attack. This is how you defend against an adversary on your network. This is how you isolate. This is how you block and tackle. And before you knew it, we had them writing scripts for us.”

“They were awesome. I love getting them in. And that’s how we can work on the future,” said Buchanan.