The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is rolling out a new education platform that the agency says will offer a more modern cyber training environment for CISA staff, the broader federal workforce, veterans and other users.

The new platform, CISA Learning, debuted this month. It serves up cybersecurity classes ranging from cloud security and ethical hacking to risk management and malware analysis.

The new platform is replacing both CISA’s internal education platform, as well as the Federal Virtual Training Environment, known as FedVTE, which had been used by users from across the federal government and other external organizations.

In an interview, CISA Chief People Officer Elizabeth Kolmstetter said CISA Learning provides an “integrated enterprise learning environment.”

“This is really the one stop go-to learning solution for our workforce, but our external partners free of charge,” Kolmstetter said. “CISA does so much in the learning and skilling and understanding what is needed as far as training that we want to share that. We don’t need it just for our workforce, but we want to share that with many partners and stakeholders and citizens, so that everybody can benefit from this.”

Kolmstetter said CISA is migrating the user data of more than 500,000 individuals from FedVTE to CISA Learning. That includes approximately 412,000 federal employees; 25,000 users from state, local, tribal and territorial governments; 12,000 users at public universities and nonprofits; and 92,000 veterans.

The new platform is live with an “initial operational capability,” Kolmstetter said.

“The information is there, the training courses are there, but we are going to keep building out what I would like to call a better user experience,” she said. “We have some search capability now, but that’s going to get even better, and hopefully we can get to the point where we’re actually suggesting the next courses for our users, rather than them having to search on keywords.”

The training platform also should give users an improved ability to track their progress from basic through advanced courses, as well as the ability to tailor their experience across online synchronous and asynchronous training, as well as some in-person courses, according to Kolmstetter.

And CISA officials will also be able to pull more detailed metrics from the new platform.

“We like to have our ability, but also our users’ ability, to do comprehensive reporting on what is being useful, what is being taken,” Kolmstetter said. “What are the things that are needed more of so we can invest in creating more content where it’s needed most.”

CISA is partnering with other organizations like the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the General Services Administration to make their training courses available through CISA Learning. For instance, the new platform offers a series of GSA webinars on artificial intelligence.

“We partnered with them and brought that content, and we’re one of the first agencies to actually have that in our in-house learning management system,” Kolmstetter said. “That’s something we’re working very hard, because I truly believe that everyone in every job should have some working knowledge of artificial intelligence so they can understand what it is, how it’s being used, and then think about how it could be a tool to help them do their jobs better. And we’re bringing that to our workforce and for the whole government through this new learning system.”

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