Security depth. Teaching craft.

I'm Ben Mickens, a cybersecurity educator and human risk strategist based in San Antonio, Texas. I work both sides of one problem: how systems get compromised, and how people learn to stop it.

I have spent over 20 years teaching, first in clinical healthcare as an instructor, trainer, and clinician, where a misconfigured system is not an IT problem. It is a patient safety issue. Moving into software development and then cybersecurity was a lane shift, not a career change: the core work is still understanding how people learn, meeting them where they are, and measuring whether it moved the needle. The healthcare years still shape how I think about risk. Every system has humans in it, and a breach lands on real people.

I completed a master's degree in cybersecurity and keep current through daily hands-on practice, national cyber defense competitions (SWCCDC, National Cyber League, US Cyber Games), cloud security work, and AI security research. That depth convinced me the biggest gap in security is not tooling. It is people, and the way we train them.

So the next step is deliberate: a Master of Education in Educational Technology and Instructional Design, in progress since September 2026. Security expertise tells you what to teach. Learning science tells you how. CyberPsyon is where the two meet: security awareness training, human risk assessment, and tools like CertRx that treat learning as an engineering problem.