I love teaching. I do. I love having students who are engaged and excited in class, who are there to learn and grow. You know what else I really enjoy about teaching? Courseware that lends itself to clear understanding of the topic at hand.

At LRS Education Services we have been offering NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NCSF) courses for the last several years. We used courseware from a vendor with whom we had a strong relationship, and it was good material. Cybersecurity is a critical subject for our time, especially as threats increase and attacks continue to get more sophisticated.

As is our general process, we take any course we offer and look for ways to provide even more value to our students. It doesn’t matter if the course is from Microsoft, CompTIA, or any other vendor, we do our best to find out what you, the student, need from a course, and we use that information to improve the course. In some cases, we add many new slides, modify or create demos, and even remove sections that aren’t relevant.

Back in late 2019 we saw some changes in the NIST Cybersecurity courseware space. The changes were moves away from a detailed study of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and into other areas.

Having spent years in the classroom with our students, and working with organizations to conduct cybersecurity assessments, we knew that our clients valued very much having training courses that align directly to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.

LRS Education Services had a dilemma. The Framework courses we had been teaching were no longer going to be available, and there was not a comparable substitute to meet our client’s needs. So, what would YOU do?

Here is what we did.

We made a commitment. To you, our clients, and students. We made a commitment to continue to offer you cybersecurity courses that were built on the foundation of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. Courses that are all about the Framework. Content that is straight from the Framework, referenced by the Framework, related directly to the Framework, shows the relevance of the Framework to the real world, and or teaches you how to get the Framework up and running in your organization.

How did we pull this off? We started from scratch. We invested months of shelter-in-place time and thousands of dollars to create our own courses. LRS Education Services removed all the old courseware from our offerings and went back to the source. To NIST…and we built from there.

Why?

So you could enjoy our best NIST Cybersecurity Framework courses ever!

As you may know at the end of every class, we provide students with a survey that has questions about their experience. I’d like to share a question and a response from a student who attended a June 2020 class with us that used our new courseware:

What suggestions do you have for enhancing the courseware?

"I really enjoyed the content! No improvement."

That, my friends, is why we invested so much in creating fresh, relevant courseware. Three classes, over 700 pages of new content, with one goal. To provide for you our best NIST Cybersecurity Framework courses ever.

Oh, and since we created the content, and we own the content, we can update the content as we see changes to technologies, attacks, threats, and even more effective ways to implement the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to secure your organization. Our best NIST Cybersecurity courses ever? For now. But we will keep working to make them even better!

We hope you join us soon; all of these courses are available to attend virtually for your convenience. Check out the courses, Guaranteed To Run monthly…new topics, new materials, new value.

NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NCSF) Foundation Training

NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NCSF) Practitioner Training

NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NCSF) Boot Camp Training

-Troy Stoneking, NIST CSF Professional Accredited Trainer and Cybersecurity Assessor