Cyber Innovation Lab is latest link in Lockheed Martin, UCF chain
For the past month I’ve seen a great deal of coverage concerning the University of Central Florida. I want to share another perspective many people don’t often read about in the news.
When Lockheed Martin’s Orlando business units were looking to partner with a university to start a program focused on cybersecurity, there was only one logical answer — UCF. This vision came to fruition last month with the opening of a new Cyber Innovation Lab within UCF’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. It focuses on this surging capability needed by almost every company in America.
Since the 1950s, Lockheed Martin has been present in Central Florida working on cutting-edge technology protecting our nation and its allies. We’ve pushed the envelope in areas like simulation, training, lasers, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, advancing both our company and Orlando’s high-tech industry along the way.
The new UCF cyber lab now helps us proactively engage in an area we’ve seen grow 400 percent in the past five years. It’s not just Lockheed Martin that will benefit, as a projected 13,000 new cyber-related jobs are coming to Florida in the next five years. Cyber is one of the most in-demand and fastest-growing sectors of an innovation economy.
So why UCF for cyber? For starters, UCF students have won four cyber defense national championships in the past five years. UCF doesn’t just win in football! But it was much more than their winning ways. We have more than 50 years of successful, intertwined history telling us it was the right place.
Many people don’t realize it, but Lockheed Martin employs more UCF graduates nationwide than alumni of any other university. This includes such notable engineering schools as MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Penn State and Georgia Tech. The cyber lab is just the next chapter of an incredibly successful relationship critical to both of us.
We currently have more than 600 students a year interning with us in Orlando, learning how our industry works while we benefit from their fresh perspectives. In addition, Lockheed Martin has hired more than 3,000 UCF students as employees after they have completed the College Work Experience Program.
The student-to-employee conversion rate is, in fact, quite remarkable. Currently, 27 percent of our 8,000 Orlando employees are UCF alumni. Of those, approximately 70 percent have a STEM-related job.
Like any high-performing company, we want the best and most talented people to work for us. It’s clear that we’ve accomplished this with the pipeline we’ve built with UCF graduates. Consider, with UCF contributing brainpower, our Orlandobased locations won $10 billion of competitive contracts in the past 18 months alone. This translates into a projected $36 billion of economic impact for Orlando during the next decade.
Many of the technical advances securing America’s freedom or making life easier for us all are products of the imagination, determination and intellect of UCF graduates. We simply couldn’t perform our mission without them.