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A 20-week, remote-first cybersecurity program for women with STEM backgrounds in Egypt and Jordan, made possible by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, whose backing sustained a program of this scale across both countries at once. Every outcome below was tracked at the individual level for seven months after training ended, and independently evaluated by a third-party firm whose findings we publish in full.
A CompTIA Security+ credential opens a screening gate. It does not, on its own, produce a job — particularly for women entering a sector where they are underrepresented and where most hiring runs through networks they are not part of.
Cyber Advance was designed so that placement work started while training was still running, and continued for seven months after it ended. That sequencing is the reason the completion rate and the employment rate are close together rather than far apart.
Cyber Advance ran from October 2024 to September 2026 under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Training was delivered remote-first across both countries simultaneously.
A regional recruitment campaign run through 16 university partners and 9 community organizations, filtered by a technical aptitude assessment rather than credentials alone.
Twenty weeks of live cybersecurity instruction, professional development, and CompTIA Security+ preparation, delivered to working professionals, recent graduates, and unemployed jobseekers in the same cohort.
Individual career coaching, a curated job board, and direct referral of named candidates to hiring managers — continuing for seven months after the last class.
Every figure below is a count of named individuals, collected through monthly surveys of all 133 graduates from December 2025 through June 2026 — not a projection or a sample estimate. Placements continue to accrue through the end of the performance period in September 2026.
| Measure | Egypt | Jordan | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Graduated Completed all mandatory training requirements | 65 | 68 | 133 Against a mandated cohort of 130 |
| Gained a new job Among the 78 graduates who entered the program unemployed | 27 | 39 | 66 84% of those 78 |
| Gained a better job Among the 55 graduates already working — higher pay, seniority, hours, or flexibility | 31 | 20 | 51 92% of those 55 |
| New or improved employment The program's headline commitment to the funder | 58 | 59 | 117 87% of the 133 graduates — target was 80% |
Nine graduates — 7% of the cohort — were admitted to master's and PhD programs in quantum science, nuclear engineering, applicable computing, software engineering, and AI and robotics, at universities in Germany, France, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Jordan, and Egypt. Several credited the program in their applications as evidence of practical technical work beyond their coursework.
Mindset, an independent research firm based in Jordan, conducted a baseline survey in June 2025 and an endline survey in June 2026, six months after training ended. They reached 107 of the 160 people originally enrolled — 97 graduates and 10 who left the program early. The evaluation is cross-sectional and self-reported, and the evaluators describe their findings as descriptive trajectories rather than causal estimates. We think that caveat matters, so we lead with it.
Among the 97 graduates who completed the endline survey, employment rose from 35% at baseline to 66% at endline, and 80% had held paid work at some point since the program began. Among those who entered unemployed, 71% secured work — most as cyber analysts or IT technicians, the exact roles the program was designed to supply.
Read the full evaluation report →Correlation One's monthly survey covers all 133 graduates and returns 117 with new or improved employment — 87%. Mindset's independent endline, run on the 96 graduates who completed both a baseline and an endline survey, returns 73 — 76%. Both are accurate. They differ on three specifiable dimensions: coverage, timing, and the definition of the outcome being measured.
We surveyed every graduate monthly. Mindset reached 96 who completed both the baseline and endline surveys — the matched set required for any before-and-after comparison. Thirty-seven graduates fall outside their denominator.
Mindset's fieldwork ran 4–10 June 2026, a single week. Our count is continuous and runs to the end of the program in September 2026. Anyone who took up an offer after 10 June appears in one dataset and not the other.
We ask every graduate directly, each month, whether they have taken up new or improved employment. Mindset's primary employment question asks whether the respondent worked in the previous seven days — a point-in-time measure that reads differently for freelancers, contractors, and anyone between engagements.
An evaluation that only confirms the implementer's own numbers is not worth commissioning. Three of these came out of the external evaluation. The fourth is operating knowledge that shaped the cohort before it started.
Participants aged 25 and over applied at rates comparable to younger participants, and the evaluation recorded no interview invitations from those open applications. The placements this group did achieve came through direct employer matching by our team — which locates the constraint in the open application channel rather than in the candidates.
Direct employer matching becomes the primary channel for participants over 25 from day one, rather than the route we fall back on.
Most hold the CompTIA Security+ certification, and most had direct employer matching. So the credential was not the binding constraint, and on the evidence available neither was access to employers. We do not yet know what was.
We are interviewing this group directly to understand what is holding placement back, before designing anything around it.
Graduates entering the labor market for the first time secured roles carrying fewer benefits than those held by participants already employed. Set against job satisfaction rising from 69% to 87% across the cohort, this reads less as lower job quality than as a shift in how regional employers structure compensation — away from benefits packages, toward net salary and advancement.
We are mapping how employers in both markets now build compensation, so job quality can be assessed on the terms the market actually uses.
Across more than 2,000 women Correlation One has supported into work in the region, attrition settles near 20% — driven by life and family commitments rather than by capability or engagement. Cyber Advance was therefore enrolled at 160 against a mandated cohort of 130. Twenty-seven participants left, and 133 still graduated.
Nothing — this is the practice being kept. Cohorts continue to be sized above the mandate so attrition is absorbed by design rather than reported later as a shortfall.
Luma joined Cyber Advance as an undergraduate in digital forensics. She graduated from university one month later, earned her CompTIA Security+ three months after that, and worked with her career coach on interview preparation and job search strategy throughout. She now works in public-sector security operations, in an environment built on U.S.-origin frameworks including NIST and MITRE ATT&CK alongside ISO 27001.
Rawan enrolled while working outside cybersecurity, and rated her personal wellbeing at 2 out of 10 at baseline. At the endline survey she was working as a senior cybersecurity analyst with full benefits, and rated her wellbeing at 7. Her is one of the sector-pivot cases the evaluation documents: participants who arrived with a job in another field and left with one in this one.
Reaching 4,881 qualified women in Egypt and Jordan required a distribution network that did not exist at the start of the award. It exists now, and it is reusable for any program targeting the same population.
8 in Jordan, 8 in Egypt — recruiting into the same cohort simultaneously
4 in Jordan, 5 in Egypt — foundations, civil society, and student networks
Built from zero at award start, and reusable for any program reaching this population
Cyber Advance for Women in MENA is funded by the United States Government through the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.
The contents of this page are the responsibility of Correlation One and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Government.
Cyber Advance was built for two countries and one sector. The design — selective admission, remote-first delivery, certification as a gate rather than a goal, and placement support that outlasts the training — transfers to others.
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