How Novacoast Is Equipping Those Who Are Blind Or Visually Impaired For Cybersecurity Roles

The solution provider is seeing early success with its Apex Program, which trains members of the blind and visually impaired community to become cybersecurity professionals—and the goal is now to scale up the program nationally.

In the 18 years since David Mayne suffered a car accident caused by a speeding driver, he has faced one physical challenge after another. But none of it has prevented him from moving forward and helping others who, like him, are unwilling to let physical hurdles stifle their passion for cybersecurity.

With every setback, “I just look at it as, ‘OK, this has happened. I can’t change that,’” Mayne (pictured) said. “What I can do is handle what I do about it and how I live my life.”

After the 2006 accident, despite numerous surgeries that tried to save his left leg and left eye, Mayne ended up losing both. Then, due to an unrelated infection, he suffered the loss of his other leg earlier this year.

Through it all, Mayne said he’s done his best to stay focused on what he can actually control. And lately, that has included continuing to work on behalf of the cybersecurity workforce training program he runs, even if it meant working from his hospital bed earlier this year.

“I was like, ‘I’m just lying here—I’d like to feel useful,’” Mayne recalled.

Mayne is the director of the Apex Program, a unique workforce training program he developed to enable members of the blind and visually impaired community to enter the cybersecurity field. The program is backed by cybersecurity solution and service provider Novacoast, where he has worked since 2018 after achieving certification cybersecurity.

The aim of the Apex Program is to prepare graduates to pass CompTIA security or networking certification exams and get equipped to enter a sector with a huge demand for workers.

Mayne, who teaches the courses himself through recorded lessons, said it took a year to get everything set up so that the training would be accessible for students from the blind and visually impaired community.

“Learning how to teach binary math to someone who can't see a blackboard—that was a month just by itself,” Mayne said. “How do you teach math without showing it on a board?”

Like with so many other things in his life since his accident, Mayne figured out how to meet this and other challenges involved in setting up the program, which has also received assistance from Envision, a nonprofit that serves people who are blind or visually impaired.

The 10-week Apex Program debuted last year. And since then, 34 students have gone through the program, with five more starting next week. The goal is to scale up the program nationwide as quickly as possible, Mayne said.

‘They Need The Opportunity’

Even with advancements in accessibility in recent decades, experts say that members of the blind and visually impaired community still have a disproportionately high unemployment rate.

The global shortfall on cybersecurity talent, meanwhile, is no secret either. In the world of cybersecurity, “there are not enough analysts to fill the open positions that we have,” said Paul Anderson, founder and CEO of Wichita, Kan.-based Novacoast.

At the same time, it’s clear that members of blind and visually impaired community can acquire the skills to fill open roles in the field, Anderson said.

“They just need the at-bat—they need the opportunity,” he said.

The program’s very first graduate, Curtis Jackson, is proving that this thesis is on the mark.

‘Dream Job’

Jackson said he earned an IT certification more than a decade ago but struggled to find a job in the field and ultimately let the certification lapse. “But I never stopped believing in it,” he said.

A role in cybersecurity, he noted, has long been a “dream job.”

However, for someone who is blind, “I didn’t know if it was possible,” Jackson said, citing the lack of accessibility for many IT roles.

Jackson enrolled in the Apex Program in June 2023 and says there’s no doubt it was a demanding 10 weeks of training.

“You definitely have to be dedicated and have the passion for it,” he said. “It was definitely a bootcamp for cybersecurity.”

Jackson, though, said he was “up for the challenge.” And after completing the course, Jackson found himself in the running for an analyst position at Novacoast.

The goal of the Apex Program isn’t necessarily to train workers for roles at Novacoast itself, Mayne noted. But after meeting Jackson, Mayne said it was clear that Jackson was a fit for the company’s culture.

Jackson was hired in September 2023 and said the job is everything he hoped it would be. And going forward, he hopes that more people from the blind and visually impaired community might be able to have the same opportunity.

“Making as much of the cybersecurity field as accessible as possible—that would be great,” said Jackson, who also hosts the “Living the dream with curveball” podcast in his spare time.

“That would give more people an opportunity to get into the field,” he said. “And hopefully they don’t have to leave their hometown or leave their family because a lot of times for blind and visually impaired people to get jobs, they have to uproot and go halfway across the country.”

Growth Goals

Looking ahead, Mayne said expanding the program to serve more people from the blind and visually impaired community—as well as those with other types of disabilities and to veterans—is very much the goal. Expanding the program to more states is a gradual process since it requires individual approvals from every state, Mayne noted.

However, “once we get to being in the majority of the states, we're hoping to run 300 or 400 students through a year,” Mayne said, noting that the program fees are paid by state agencies.

Ultimately, the Apex Program is taking some of the first steps toward “overcoming the stigma” that members of the blind community wouldn’t be able to do the job of a cybersecurity analyst, Mayne said.

“They can,” he said, “and Curtis is proof of that.”