ICTC’s recently published strategy, Digital Talent: Road to 2020 and Beyond, outlines that it is increasingly important that the workers of tomorrow have the skills needed to be global leaders in the digital economy. In order to ensure future success in a dynamic and evolving digital ecosystem, Canada needs to nurture a strong youth pipeline for S.T.E.M. (science, technology, engineering and math). Sisler High School amplifies this, fostering innovation through grades 9-12, and leading as an example for Canadian high schools across the nation. Sisler has been acclaimed as one of the ten best public schools in Canada and the best all-around high school by Maclean’s Magazine.
As the largest secondary school in Manitoba, Sisler hosts a distinguished Network and Cyber Security Academy, offering vocational courses as well as extra-curricular Cyber Security camps. Recently, students of the Cyber Camp participated in CyberPatriot’s annual Youth Cyber Defense Competition. The competition places teams of high school and middle school students in the positions of newly hired Information Technology professionals, tasked with managing the network of a small company. Sisler is the only Canadian school to qualify and in 2016 finished in the top 1% of thousands of American teams. The Winnipeg high school has made five consecutive appearances at the CyberPatriot National U.S.A. finals.
Awards are something Sisler sees a lot of. In their latest competition, Sisler’s team won the Cisco Networking Challenge Award (Open Division), and was declared the Overall Cisco Challenge Winner at CyberPatriot VIII in Baltimore, MD. Moreover, Sisler students captured both gold and silver medals at Skills Manitoba in the IT-Network Systems Administration (Secondary) 2016 competition.
The Cyber Security program is one of many Sisler programs that was instrumental in establishing the city of Winnipeg ’s Top 7 of ICF’s most “Intelligent Communities” of 2016. Notably, the program also puts a spotlight on young women providing female students with opportunities to attend events such as Microsoft’s DigiGirlz, which provides insight into careers in Information Technology.
ICTC is excited to be partnering with Sisler High School and will be utilizing this partnership for upcoming Cyber Security initiatives, subscribe to our mailing list to keep up to date on this initiative.
Please visit www.sislerhigh.org to learn more about Sisler’s many achievements.