Growing army of cyber apprentices are working to keep Scotland safe.
Cybercrime is the faceless, insidious attack on a hugely valuable yet worryingly vulnerable resource – our data. Research by global consultants McKinsey this year says that even before the global pandemic, “executive teams faced a challenging and dynamic environment as they sought to protect their institutions from cyberattack, without degrading their ability to innovate and extract value from technology investments”.
And for any company – or public sector organisation – that is digitising its businesses and automatising its operations without an effective cyber security strategy, the risks continue to multiply.
Scotland’s national skills agency, Skills Development Scotland (SDS) reports – through its technology skills and careers portal Digital World – some sobering statistics: cybercrime was the second most reported crime in the world last year, with a hack taking place every 39 seconds, and will cost in excess of £6 trillion by the end of 2021, with 43 per cent of cyber-attacks targeting small businesses.
It’s less, says Claire Gillespie, digital technology skills manager at SDS, a case of “if” you are hacked but “when”. Which is why the agency highlighted Cyber Security Apprenticeships at Scottish Apprenticeship Week earlier this month, demonstrating how they offer one of the most effective ways of making sure companies and organisations are cyber ready.
“We focused on cyber security because of the growing requirement in this area and because SMEs are becoming acutely aware of the importance of cyber resilience, with apprenticeships a cost-effective way to plug that skills gap for smaller companies,” she says.
For many, the hazards of cybercrime have been highlighted with many staff now working from home but she adds that even pre-Covid there was a growing demand for young people with the appropriate skills.
“However, we also need people with blended skill sets, with experience in finance, data and healthcare, for example. So we and our partners in education and government have a big responsibility to develop cyber skills for people coming not only through schools, colleges and universities but also upskill existing staff.”
There is a real appetite from employers regarding the diversity of their staff. “They recognise the value of people with different skills and from different backgrounds. Someone who is perhaps slightly older can bring great value because they’ve already gained some of those skills,” says Gillespie. Among those attesting to this is Stuart Macdonald of BlueShield IT.
Another example is the new SDS partnership project launched last year with social enterprise SaluteMyJob, Abertay University, IBM and tech start-up Skillzminer, with the aim of retraining Scottish Armed Forces veterans to help address the significant skills gap in the nation’s cyber security workforce.
The past decade, says Gillespie, has seen a surge in the recognition of the value of apprenticeships to employers. “Year on year we’ve increased the number of apprenticeship frameworks, so now we have Cyber Security and Data Analytics, for example, which are very much growth areas in Scotland. It’s been an evolving journey as employers are increasingly open to looking at multiple pathways to recruit.”
The diversity of recruits reflects the plurality of products and services provided: “The world is 50 per cent women and 50 per cent men across a whole range of ages, so it’s important that the teams and businesses developing these products and services are equally diverse and represent different career pathways and different backgrounds,” she stresses.
From Foundation Apprenticeships for secondary school pupils through Modern Apprenticeships, which are open to new or existing employees to Graduate Apprenticeships delivered in partnership with universities and colleges, SDS is working to address the needs of the 82 per cent of Scottish businesses who still find it difficult to recruit people with the right digital skills.
Listening to the needs of these companies and organisations is a cornerstone of how the agency designs its programmes. “We’ve done research on gender and technology and formed an action plan and researched neuro-diversity and technology again, have an action plan. Everything the team does is industry-led and we conducted both of these pieces of work in response to employer demand,” she says.
“Technology apprenticeships are developed in line with what employers tell us they need and might subsequently need and apprenticeships are refreshed to make sure they’re future proofed for employers’ requirements.”
Fifteen universities in Scotland deliver a range of Graduate Apprenticeships and, as with all of these, the Cyber Security Apprenticeship entails a close working relationship between university and employer. “There’s support available at all stages to employers, even just at the early days of inducting apprentices to give them guidance,” says Gillespie.
“Many companies hit the ground running as they are massively keen to promote their vacancies but we are able to help in areas such as where they should recruit, where to post their adverts, their use of language in adverts and promoting their working practises.
“Sometimes people don’t realise that the relatively small changes they can have a huge impact in terms of the people who apply for the jobs – and also the people who are retained in these jobs.”
She’s encouraged by the recognition that cyber professionals are essential to protect Scotland as a country and, in addition, that everyone needs to be cyber secure on an individual level. “The Scottish Government and SDS are making sure we are all aware of that responsibility and are working with groups such as Young Scot to ensure that young people know how to look after their passwords and keep themselves safe online.”
Gillespie believes that apprenticeships bring passionate and motivated talent to employers and help take careers in technology far beyond the sector itself: “You don’t have to be a doctor or a nurse to work in medicine or a footballer to be part of a top team. You can be an app developer, a data analyst – or a cyber security specialist in many sectors.”
This blog was originally written by Colin Cardwell and Fiona Laing and published in FutureScot.
