| | September 20158By Jim Sills, CIO/Cabinet Secretary, State of DelawareDespite the steadily improving unemployment rate, many Americans are not benefiting from the improving economy because they lack technical skills in demand for today's expanding industries. At the same time employers are struggling to fill good paying jobs. Working with the industry, Governor Jack Markell and I are striving to close the skills gap in our state so that Delawareans have the jobs they want and employers have access to the talented workforce they need. Delaware state government is different than most others because it is uniquely consolidated and centralized. In Delaware, the CIO is an appointed member of the Governor's Cabinet, and is responsible for delivering a full range of information and communication technology services to the sixteen departments within the Executive, Judiciary, and Legislative branches and K-12 School Districts, totaling approximately 33,000 employees. One of the primary responsibilities of the Department of Technology and Information (DTI) is the protection of state data and infrastructure along with addressing the IT talent shortage in the cyber security space. Get InvolvedGiven the frequency in the news of various corporate and institutional breaches, cyber outages, Heartbleed Bug, and other types of security events, it is critical that Senior IT leaders develop strategies to help create the workforce of the future that is outside of our respective organizations. As we are all aware, that there are more IT related job openings then qualified candidates, one way to address this national issue is to focus on solving this problem at the local level. As CIOs ­ Do we want to drive change in this space or just continue doing our normal IT related functions and roles? It is critical for CIO's to become Ever-Changing Cyber Security of Business CommunityCIO INSIGHT
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