Parksville sea cadet Victor Kamel helped develop a new virtual summer training course for all cadets across Canada.
Kamel has worked hard with a team of officers and staff cadets to create a Cyber Security Course that is now included in the cadets’ virtual camp programs.
“It’s great to see this now being taught as we spent at lot of time developing the course material and getting it ready for the cadets to learn,” said Kamel, who was invited to join the development team due his IT skills and also having completed U.S.-based courses in standard and advanced cyber security training and and a cyber security coaches certificate. “It’s great that the cadet program has been so adaptable. We got this thing together quite quickly because there’s thousands of cadets that are participating in all of these activities.”
Kamel has been an highly involved with the sea cadets in Parksville. He is a biathlete, a marksman, a member of the first aid team, a drum major and also a sailing instructor.
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Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the summer sea cadet programs outdoors have been cancelled which altered Kamel’s routine this time of the year. He’s spending more time teaching the standard cyber training course and the advance cyber training course to cadets from all over the country.
“It’s quite different from any of the cadet programs I have done in the past,” said Kamel. “Typically I would be doing sailing and biathlon and stuff. This cyber security stuff is really new to the program. We can’t really teach biathlon over a virtual meeting but cyber security and other courses that we run are a lot more amenable to that. It’s great that the cadet program is leveraging the different skill sets of the instructors we have in a different way.”
Kamel, who graduated this year from Ballenas Secondary, said that after helping to develop these courses he now also sees career options in cyber security he did not know existed. He plans to attend University of Victoria and study computer science in the fall.
