Emerging Technology, Quantum Education

45 Faculty Explore CNM’s Hands-On Quantum Training Methods

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June 18, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Central New Mexico Community College (CNM) is developing a new approach to quantum workforce development, recently hosting a Quantum Educators Workshop for 45 faculty members and academic leaders representing institutions from Maryland to Arizona, Florida to South Dakota. September marked the launch of CNM’s Quantum Technician Bootcamp, the first workforce development program of its kind in the United States and a model for national replication. The workshop, held just before this press release, focused on hands-on quantum education, led by CNM instructors and other educators, to equip participants with strategies for expanding access to quantum learning. This collaborative effort aims to broaden the nation’s quantum talent pipeline as the technology transitions toward commercial applications.

CNM’s Quantum Technician Bootcamp: A National Workforce Development Model

The event held just before wasn’t merely a theoretical discussion; it provided a hands-on introduction to quantum education, with sessions led by CNM instructors from the Quantum Technician Bootcamp alongside other leading quantum educators. This collaborative approach underscores CNM’s commitment to broadening access to quantum training beyond traditional research institutions and into community colleges. Demand is increasing for technicians capable of constructing, operating, and maintaining the complex systems that underpin the quantum industry, and CNM’s bootcamp is designed to meet this need with an immersive, 10-week program requiring no prior experience.

The program’s accessibility is a key feature; graduates are immediately eligible for high-quality positions, with recent cohorts securing starting salaries around $80,000. Brian Rashap, CNM’s Lead Quantum Educator, explained, “You don’t need an advanced degree—or even prior experience in math or science—to train as a quantum technician and launch a career in one of the fast-emerging fields of the future.” The impact extends beyond CNM’s Albuquerque campus. Participants at the Quantum Educators Workshop are now equipped to integrate quantum concepts and hands-on learning into their own curricula, expanding the national quantum talent pipeline.

Bernice Brezina, Vice President for the Division of Learning at the College of Southern Maryland, noted that the workshop was successful. The program’s success is also attracting industry partnerships; Qunnect, a quantum networking company, has already hired several CNM bootcamp graduates, recognizing the program’s ability to produce job-ready technicians. Shane Andrewski, a Field Engineer with Qunnect, said, “The partnership with CNM has been awesome because normally when you think quantum, you think Ph.D.’s locked in a lab.” CNM’s model, developed in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories and as a lead institution within the Elevate Quantum consortium, is shaping the future of quantum education nationwide.

The Quantum Educator Workshop delivered by CNM provided a valuable opportunity for our Physics and Engineering faculty at College of Southern Maryland to develop their knowledge of quantum computing in a hands-on environment.

Bernice Brezina, Vice President for the Division of Learning at the College of Southern Maryland
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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