Rebecca Chisolm

Rebecca leads the Cisco Networking Academy team for North America, where her team works to offer workforce development education and courses to a broad spectrum of students through an extensive network of dedicated partners.

Cisco Networking Academy focuses on the latest networking, security, and emerging technologies, while promoting business and entrepreneurial skills. Our courses and workshops provide foundational skills in network programmability and programming, as well as job readiness skills in cybersecurity for students of all levels, particularly those wanting to pursue a career in this thriving industry.

Rebecca and her team are passionate about working with governments, non-profits and educational institutions to offer best-in-class technology training programs to reskill and upskill adult workers, and also excite and educate young students – preparing all for the rapidly growing jobs in the world of information technology. In the United States alone, 1.7 million students have participated since the inception of the program in 1997, and we have 1850 education partners.

Rebecca grew up in a public sector family and began her professional life as a high school teacher. She has spent her entire career in the public sector market, where she led sales, customer engagement, and business development teams at Sun Microsystems, Adobe, and Autodesk, prior to joining Cisco.

She loves seeing the broad range of public sector customers benefit from deploying novel solutions to today’s problems across the spectrum of state and local education. She is deeply committed to the benefits the nation can receive from a technically educated workforce, given the presence of IT in every field of work today.