Marshall University Prepares Cybersecurity Students
The cybersecurity industry faces a challenge: employers want experienced candidates, but students need experience to land jobs. Marshall University is addressing this issue through a partnership with Intuit, providing students with hands-on experience in a security operations center.
James Lanham, director of operations at Marshall University’s Institute for Cyber Security, explains that students need experience before they can land jobs, but employers want people with experience.
A security operations center, or SOC, is a facility where analysts monitor potential threats, flag suspicious activity, and escalate concerns to protect a company’s data. Alexandria Donathan, executive director of the Institute for Cyber Security, says that a SOC is where the initial steps and triage happen.
Regardless of industry, everything has systems, data, and information to protect, and a SOC analyst is the gatekeeper for these systems. Lanham says a good SOC analyst must be curious, patient, and able to make good decisions.
They need to ask the right questions, follow the evidence, write down what they find, and know when something needs to be escalated. When they do that well, they can help an organization catch problems early, respond faster, and avoid a much larger incident.
In 2025, Marshall University announced its partnership with Intuit, which Donathan believes is an example of what higher education needs more of: industry and academia working together to align education with real, operational workforce demands.
This partnership allows students to graduate with applied learning skills they’re ready to use on day one. The partnership covers the cost of two full-time employees who will be working out of a shared space on campus until the new Institute for Cyber Security building is finished in August 2027.
Students will be managed by a member of the institute but will be working directly with Intuit, including using their proprietary data. This will give students the unique advantage of adding real Intuit work experience to their resumes while still in college.
The institute works closely with faculty from across the university to ensure that curricula mirror industry standards and employer needs. The SOC is an example of this relationship, and the institute has already created several microcredentials, which are short programs or courses focused on a specific skill.
While students from any major can apply to the SOC, the institute has curated a list of suggested courses that interested students can consider taking before applying.
The SOC is not just a learning space; it is helping to build the workforce, says Lanham. Students are seeing how the work is actually done, how professionals think through problems, and what employers are really looking for. This partnership is a step towards addressing the cybersecurity workforce gap, and it’s an example of how industry and academia can work together to prepare students for the evolving cybersecurity workforce, much like the efforts of institutions adopting systemwide artificial intelligence policies, such as artificial intelligence policies.
They are making progress.
