The annoying thing about quantum computing, from a workforce-planning perspective, is the timing problem. At some point, quantum machines may be good enough to break the cryptography that currently protects power grids and banks and everything else, and at that point you would like to have a lot of people trained to deal with it. But “at some point” is not a semester. So what do you do? If you are the National Institute of Standards and Technology, you hand out relatively small cooperative agreements to regional alliances and let them start building the pipeline before the threat fully arrives. As Florida Atlantic University announced, its College of Engineering and Computer Science has received a $200,000 NIST cooperative agreement — through the Regional Alliances and Multistakeholder Partnerships to Stimulate, or RAMPS, Cybersecurity Education and Workforce Development program — to build a quantum cybersecurity workforce across Palm Beach and Broward counties and the Treasure Coast counties of Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River.
Two hundred thousand dollars is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of federal research spending — it would buy you roughly one-tenth of a decent quantum-computing startup’s espresso budget — but the structure is instructive. The money isn’t really for quantum computing. It’s for curriculum development, hands-on training and career pathways: workshop series, reusable course materials aligned with the NICE Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity and CyberSeek, mentoring, internships, employer engagement and a regional consortium connecting universities, K-12 schools, industry, government, utilities and community organizations. In other words, NIST is funding the connective tissue between a bunch of institutions that already exist. The bet is that the workforce gap is less about physics and more about coordination — getting the school district, the utility researchers and the FBI-adjacent infrastructure people in the same room, with the same vocabulary, before the same emergency.
The partner list is a good illustration of the theory. FAU is leading the project with D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NASDAQ: QBTS) — a publicly traded quantum computing company, which gets both goodwill and a trained customer base out of the deal; training people on your machines is a time-honored way of selling machines — plus InfraGard South Florida Members Alliance, which connects the FBI with private-sector critical infrastructure stakeholders; the School District of Palm Beach County; Broward County Public Schools; and FAU’s Alexander D. Henderson University School, its public laboratory school for elementary and middle school students. Yes, the middle schoolers are in the quantum cybersecurity pipeline. Start them young; the cryptography isn’t going to break itself.
Wait, that’s not a thing. Continuing: the project — formally, “Building the Quantum Cybersecurity Workforce in the Palm Beach and Treasure Coast Region” — will be led by Yufei Tang, an associate professor in FAU’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science who also directs the FPL Center for Intelligent Energy Technologies, with co-principal investigators Hari Kalva, the department chair, and Zebo Yang, an assistant professor. The power-systems angle is deliberate, not incidental: the grant couples quantum cybersecurity with critical infrastructure, and the FPL InETech center provides “a real-world research and training environment for power and energy systems, including advanced simulation and hardware-in-the-loop capabilities,” as Tang put it. The scenario lurking in the background is not hard to sketch — a grid that is both increasingly digitized and eventually quantum-vulnerable is a grid you would like defended by people who understand both halves of that sentence.
The timing also works out nicely for FAU’s branding. The university says it will be the first in Florida to publicly host a dedicated 4,400-plus-qubit annealing quantum computer, a D-Wave Advantage2, on its Boca Raton campus. “This NIST award builds directly on Florida Atlantic’s investment in quantum computing,” said Stella Batalama, dean of the engineering college. “With a D-Wave Advantage2 quantum computer coming to our Boca Raton campus, we are building the infrastructure, expertise and workforce needed for the next generation of computing.” A hardware announcement and a workforce grant arriving together is not a coincidence; it is a flywheel with a federal subsidy attached. D-Wave’s Allison Schwartz, a senior vice president of global government relations and public affairs, said the program “will help create a pipeline of talent equipped to address the challenges and opportunities of the quantum era” — which is true, and also happens to be excellent government relations.
Tang’s own summary gets at the strangeness of the assignment: “Quantum computing is changing not only what computers can do, but also what cybersecurity professionals need to know.” The curriculum has to teach a threat model that mostly hasn’t happened yet, on hardware that only recently arrived. “We want to create a workforce that is prepared to secure systems in a quantum-enabled future,” he said.
FAU is one of nine organizations in eight states selected for the RAMPS program, and the grant is designed to outlive itself — shared curriculum, online training and a consortium meant to persist “beyond the initial grant period.” Whether it does depends on the usual things: follow-on money, employer appetite, and whether quantum computing keeps moving from research laboratories into real-world applications at a pace that justifies the training. The asymmetry is the whole argument, though. If the quantum threat arrives early, $200,000 of pipeline will look prescient. If it arrives late, you will have spent $200,000 teaching Florida teenagers about qubits. There are worse ways to lose.