Our Vision

To nurture diverse talent to engage with the cyber agenda through entrepreneurial activities, preparing young people for the jobs of today and inspiring them to create the jobs of tomorrow.

This project will achieve this by co-developing, delivering and evaluating a Cyber Entrepreneurship programme for young people in KS3 and KS5, aligned with the Cyber First structure and educational approach. By moving from STEM focused cyber education, the anticipated impact is an increased in interest in cyber as a field from a more diverse (subject interest, ethnicity, socio-economic and gender) range of young people. The project will deliver new 1 day courses for KS3 and KS5 through an open source release to support the wider community. Further, the project will evaluate the potential for non-STEM focused cyber engagement programmes to engage an increased diversity of talent with the cyber agenda. As such this project provides an evidence base for the community to develop other novel approaches to attract cyber talent.

This project is directly aligned with Pillar 1: Strengthening the UK Cyber Ecosystem in the UK National Cyber Strategy[1], directly responding to the key labour challenges outlined in the DSIT cyber security labour market survey 2023[2]. It addresses the CISSE problem book areas of Routes into Cyber and Cyber Education[3] while supporting the necessary cyber skills and talent increase in the North West to support the rapidly accelerating cyber eco-system as stimulated by the National Cyber Force in Lancashire and GCHQ in Greater Manchester.

References

• [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-cyber-strategy-2022/national-cyber-security-strategy-2022
• [2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cyber-security-skills-in-the-uk-labour-market-2023
• [3] https://www.cisseuk.org/the-cse-problem-book