MyComputerCareer instructors Russ Munisteri and Jim Atria each published pieces in April and May that landed in front of audiences well outside the classroom. Russ placed two articles in the May issue of Cyber Defense Magazine. Jim published in TalentCulture. The three pieces cover skills-based hiring, orphaned online accounts, and a foundational challenge in how organizations think about learning. Here’s what each one said and why it might matter to folks building an IT career.
Russ Munisteri: The Talent Shortage Has a Hiring Problem
Russ Munisteri, CISSP and program chair & lead instructor at MyComputerCareer, opens his Cyber Defense Magazine piece with a pointed observation: the cybersecurity industry talks constantly about a talent shortage, yet many organizations filter out capable candidates before the interview even starts. The culprit is credential-first hiring, specifically the habit of requiring a four-year degree for roles where a degree has little to do with whether someone can do the job.
His six-tip framework for skills-based hiring starts where most organizations skip a step: the job description itself. Vague language like “handles a range of tasks” or “solves complex problems” tells a qualified candidate almost nothing about fit. Russ argues for specificity: list the competencies the job requires, things like familiarity with SIEM tools, incident response fundamentals, network security concepts, and compliance frameworks. That level of clarity attracts candidates who understand what the work involves.
From there, he pushes organizations to recruit through channels they often overlook: technical training programs, certification boot camps, and military transition pathways. These pipelines produce job-ready candidates who simply don’t carry traditional academic credentials. And when a degree genuinely isn’t required for a role, Russ makes the case for saying so explicitly in the posting. One statistic from his piece deserves attention: in fields where women are underrepresented, skills-first hiring increases the proportion of women candidates 24% more than it increases the proportion of men candidates. For a field with a well-documented diversity problem, that number belongs in the conversation, not a footnote.
The rest of his framework covers building a culture where skills-based hires feel respected and supported, investing in ongoing training so those hires stay current as threats evolve, setting measurable goals and checking progress regularly, and thinking long-term about workforce development rather than just filling open seats.
Russ Munisteri: The Accounts Nobody’s Watching
His second piece covers a threat category that rarely makes headlines but shows up in real-world breaches: orphaned online accounts.
When someone dies or changes jobs, their online accounts don’t disappear. They keep running. The average person manages more than 160 online accounts, and without a deliberate process to close or transfer them, many stay fully active for months or years. For attackers, an inactive account is close to ideal. Low activity makes unauthorized access harder to detect. Once inside, an attacker can maintain a presence without drawing attention.
Email carries the greatest risk. An email account isn’t just a communication tool. It’s the recovery mechanism for nearly every other account a person holds. Access to one inbox can open doors to banking, healthcare, social media, and professional systems. Russ points out that no consistent standard exists across platforms for handling accounts after someone dies or leaves an organization, and awareness of existing tools like legacy contacts or account memorialization remains low even when those features exist.
In enterprise settings, the problem extends to former contractors, vendors, and partners who may retain system access long after their engagement ends. Legacy accounts tied to old platforms are often never fully decommissioned. Personal email addresses used as recovery tools for professional accounts create a bridge between personal and corporate access most security teams aren’t tracking.
His recommendations for security teams: monitor accounts for inactivity rather than waiting for something to go wrong, enforce least-privilege access through regular reviews, treat email as a security control point with strong authentication, centralize identity management to reduce blind spots, and establish clear policies for how long an account can sit dormant before action is required. None of this demands a complete security overhaul. It demands treating inactive accounts as part of the attack surface rather than ignoring them until a breach forces the issue.
Jim Atria: The Learning Framework Everyone Gets Wrong
Jim Atria, senior live online lead instructor at MyComputerCareer, published a piece in TalentCulture that challenges one of the most widely repeated models in corporate learning and development: the 70-20-10 rule.
The model holds that 70% of learning comes from on-the-job experience, 20% from mentorship and social interaction, and 10% from formal instruction. Jim’s argument isn’t that the model is wrong. It’s that organizations apply it to situations it was never designed for.
The 70-20-10 framework came out of Center for Creative Leadership research in the 1980s, based on how experienced executives reported developing leadership skills over time. Those executives already had a foundation. They knew the vocabulary of their field. They could interpret what they experienced on the job because they had the conceptual scaffolding to make sense of it. The model describes how skilled people grow further. It doesn’t describe how beginners develop from scratch.
Jim’s analogy is direct: you wouldn’t hand a first-year medical student a scalpel and say “learn by doing.” Medical education front-loads years of structured instruction before clinical rotations begin for a reason. Experience only teaches something if the learner can interpret what’s happening. Without that foundation, experience is noise.
He also takes on the learning styles framework, pointing out that the research behind models like VARK (Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, Kinesthetic) doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Study after study finds little evidence that matching instruction to learning style preferences improves outcomes. Jim compares it to astrology in the article with his wry sense of humor fully intact: “the learning styles are about as scientifically robust as astrology signs. A teacher wouldn’t accept the excuse, ‘I’m a Capricorn, so I only learn when Mercury is in retrograde.’ Yet we routinely accept, ‘I’m a hands-on learner,’ as if it’s a cognitive law of nature.”
The practical implication for L&D professionals and program designers: before defaulting to experience-based learning, confirm whether the learner has the foundation to do so. For someone entering IT, cybersecurity, or another technical field from zero, structured instruction isn’t 10% of the learning process. As Jim puts it, that 10% can easily represent the largest chunk of time in the entire journey. Once that foundation is solid, the model works. Experience accelerates. Mentorship becomes more valuable. But skipping the foundation phase doesn’t speed learning up. It slows it down.
Our Instructors = Amazing
Three published pieces from two instructors in a single month from experts who stay engaged with the broader conversation in their fields between classes. Russ is thinking about where the cybersecurity workforce is headed and what organizations consistently get wrong about building it. Jim is thinking about how people learn technical skills, not just how organizations assume they do, among other things.
If you’re considering IT, there are some definite keepers in these articles. The hiring landscape Russ describes favors people from non-traditional backgrounds, provided they can demonstrate real skills. And the learning approach Jim describes is what strong technical training programs should deliver: a genuine foundation before the experience begins.
Want to learn more about our programs? Explore MyComputerCareer’s IT and cybersecurity programs and find out what the path from training to career looks like.