Developing that combination of skills is front and center for Chris Coleman, Chief Product Officer at CodePath, a national nonprofit providing free, industry-backed technical education to first-generation and low-income college students and early career talent that began partnering with Okta in 2022.

Okta has built the identity infrastructure to help secure today’s agentic enterprises, while CodePath, drawing on a decade of preparing students the tech industry has historically overlooked, trains the engineers who run it. Together, this is helping solve two challenges: meeting the surging demand for talent in cyber defense, and opening new paths to economic mobility in one of the economy’s highest-growth fields.

Okta is expanding its work with CodePath with a $3 million grant from the Okta for Good fund. Over three years, the investment will help CodePath make AI security a foundational skill for the next generation of software engineers by building security and agentic-AI thinking into courses across its catalog and delivering AI-security learning to college computing students, students in CS-adjacent fields, and engineers already in industry.

Victor Cordon, Director of Social Impact at Okta, sees the partnership as a way to connect economic opportunity with the industry's cybersecurity needs.

"Every company, customer, and partner in our ecosystem needs cyber talent," Cordon said. "Rather than relying on a limited pool of engineers, we need to make that pool significantly larger and make sure graduates enter the industry with baseline security fluency from day one, especially as AI reshapes how software is built. Investing in organizations like CodePath, which reaches computer science students across the country, is how we raise the standard for the entire industry."

For this next generation of cybersecurity professionals, Coleman sees one particular skill as a must-have: judgment.

"It’s thinking about what the system should and shouldn’t be able to do, what it should be allowed to do before you even build it,” Coleman explained. “At the end of the day, charting that journey towards being a discerning AI user and having the judgment to understand how these systems interact is paramount."

Exercising that kind of judgment also means anticipating how things can go wrong before they happen. This requires understanding not just how software behaves, but how bad actors attack it or use it against other people. 

"Threats come from everywhere and affect people's lives in different ways," Coleman noted. "So we have to have a different range of perspectives. The bad actors are coming from a very diverse group with a very diverse set of desires, so we need to be able to understand, empathize, and rationalize what threats are coming and what the motivations behind them are. Cybersecurity affects all of us."

That connection between diverse perspectives and effective defense isn't theoretical. For students like Miles, a CodePath cybersecurity graduate, that focus on defense began when his godmother was scammed twice by cybercriminals, Coleman said. That experience turned cybersecurity into both a career path and a personal mission. Through CodePath’s curriculum and hands-on labs, Miles translated that drive into tangible expertise, completing four internships at NASA and landing a cybersecurity role at Capital One.

"If that type of scam is a topic we're talking about in an organization, having somebody like Miles in the room, who has a lived experience around it, is incredibly powerful," Coleman said. "He brings a different perspective. He's not going to let that conversation die out without a concrete solution."

If enterprises want to prevent their AI initiatives from becoming part of that 40% cancellation statistic from Gartner, building this human layer of defense is integral. For Coleman, that means companies must actively invest in developing the practitioners who can design and enforce those risk controls.

"We need more companies investing in solutions that reach beyond their company and help support the technical and cybersecurity community at large,” Coleman said. That support includes bringing engineers into the educational process. 

“One of the things that’s made the Okta partnership work is that their engineers show up. They spend the time with the students," Coleman said.

Building that broader pipeline changes cybersecurity from a zero-sum competition for existing credentials into a durable defense ecosystem.

It’s hard to ignore the headlines, which run the gamut of how AI is impacting the labor market. But the doom-and-gloom side of the spectrum shouldn’t dissuade those looking to start a cybersecurity career, according to Coleman. 

“We are still creating software systems. We are still securing software systems. That's not going to change anytime soon,“ Coleman said. “The shift in the pathway is similar work but different skills.” 

Foundational to those skills are critical judgment and fundamental computer science principles—the exact capabilities CodePath instills in its students.

"Software systems go wrong sometimes. AI systems are gonna go wrong," Coleman said. "Who's accountable? Who's responsible? It's us as humans, right? So, I think there is a tremendous opportunity."