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Exercise Planner for National Cyber Exercise and Planning Program
 
Aveshka is looking to hire an Exercise Planner to support the National Cyber Exercise Planning Program. The National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) operates a 24X7X365 center at the intersection of government, private sector, and international network defense and communications communities. The mission to secure the cyber and communications infrastructure upon which our nation depends is a shared responsibility of Federal, State, and local governments, in active partnership with the private sector, which owns approximately 85 percent of the Nation’s critical infrastructure. The NCCIC is responsible for coordinating the national effort to secure the Nation’s infrastructure and providing primary Federal contact for coordinating protection activities. The NCEPP operates as a program within the NCCIC’s Operations & Integration Division (O&I) and—by developing, designing, and conducting cyber exercises and workshops at the State, Federal, regional, sector, and international level—improves the Nation’s cyber security readiness, protection, and incident response capabilities.
 
NCEPP activities include the design, support, and execution of a broad spectrum of exercise types, depending upon the goals and objectives of the participants and sponsors. Under the Federal Emergency Management’s (FEMA) Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP), there are seven types of exercises in two categories, Discussion- and Operations-based—ranging from simple seminars to complex full-scale exercises.  The Exercise Planner will support the following activities.
 
The first four represent Discussion-based exercises:
• Seminars are informal discussions, designed to orient participants to new or updated plans, policies, or procedures (e.g., a seminar to review a new Cyber Response Standard Operating Procedure.
• Workshops resemble seminars, but are employed to build and design specific products, such as a draft plan or policy (e.g., a Training and Exercise Plan Workshop is used to develop a Multi-year Training and Exercise Plan).
• Tabletop exercises (TTX) involve key personnel discussing simulated scenarios in an informal setting. TTXs can be used to assess plans, policies, and procedures. For instance, key NCCIC personnel can be pulled together to “walk through” a scenario about how each organization would respond to a power outage in the NCCIC itself—who has the lead in communicating this, to whom is this communicated, or how might senior leadership be notified and kept apprised of the situation as it is mitigated.
• Games serve as simulations of operations often involving two or more teams, usually in a competitive environment, using rules, data, and procedure designed to depict an actual or assumed real-life situation.
 
• Operations-based Exercises validate plans, policies, agreements and procedures, clarify roles and responsibilities, and identify resource gaps in an operational environment. The following represent three types of Operations-based Exercises:
 
• Drills are coordinated, supervised activity usually employed to test a single, specific operation or function within a single entity (e.g., a fire department conducts a decontamination drill).
• Functional Exercises (FE) examine and/or validate the coordination, command, and control between various multi-agency coordination centers (e.g., emergency operation center, joint field office, etc.). A functional exercise does not involve any "boots on the ground" (i.e., first responders or emergency officials responding to an incident in real time).
• Full-Scale Exercises (FSE) are multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional, multi-discipline exercises involving functional (e.g., joint field office, emergency operation centers, etc.)

Aveshka is an Equal Opportunity Employer.