KEESLER AIR FORCE BASE, Miss.-- The 338th Training Squadron is transitioning their curriculum into building blocks to create modules available for multiple career fields as needed for cyber training.
Each career field works with cyber more and more as technologies continue to advance and cyber information that takes more than a year to integrate into a curriculum tends to be outdated. Modular training offers the ability to easily add or remove course material that may become relevant in the future or has lost relevance.
“We aren’t using mass amounts of man hours to build textbooks by directing students to the source of the information,” said Randy Simmons, 338th TRS curriculum development manager. “We went from a paper book to a PDF and saved money on printing.”
As a part of the continuum of learning, the modular curriculum allows Airmen to only take classes suited to each new duty location they travel throughout their career.
“My favorite part of the curriculum is letting the students go at their own pace,” said Tech Sgt. Gregory Tuckey, 338th TRS instructor supervisor. “Students who enter this career field with a background in cyber systems can easily excel and shorten the length they're here.”
With a self paced curriculum, students have graduated on average three days early and when a student leaves ahead of time it saves the Air Force roughly $1000 in living expenses at Keesler.
“Our goal was not to get people out faster. Our goal has been to produce better students,” said Bill Collum, 338th TRS cyber transport training manager. “Our students are coming out of the course more capable of encountering the world of advancing technology more than students from 10 years ago.”
The course has been evolving for five years as part of the process of constant evaluation and modification.
“If you stay in the Air Force for 20 years, you’re going to see this style of learning and teaching going on in every career field across the Air Force,” said Simmons.