Working with partners to skill up young women in the country.
Standard Chartered Bank plans to place 18 young women professionals from Tier II and Tier III cities in India in cyber security roles as part of the CyberShikshaa (cyber education) program. CyberShikshaa is aimed at skilling young women graduates who come from communities away from India’s major population centres.
The program in partnership with Microsoft India and Data Security Council of India (DSCI) gives graduates with an engineering degree but with lack of access to opportunities are considered and trained to be job-ready and employable in the industry. Every year, India produces 1.5 million engineering graduates, with less than a third being women.
The talent gap is further heightened with cyber security talent crunch expected to create 3.5 million unfilled jobs globally by 2021.
The special recruitment drive by Standard Chartered will help create a strong momentum to encourage more women in Cyber Security. Under the program, young women graduates undergo and complete a curriculum that includes an interactive, four-month training course combining theory, case studies and practical hands-on projects led by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), NIELIT and other training partners.
The initiative also covers mentoring and soft skill workshops, said Yuval Illuz group chief information security officer & COO, Trust, Data & Resilience at Standard Chartered.
“Attracting women to take up Cyber Security careers require a range of efforts,” he said. “More importantly, increasing women’s participation in Cyber Security is not just good for women, it’s absolutely important for the business and our society.”
Illuz noted the shared responsibility with Microsoft and DSCI to create and support extraordinarily strong career pathways in this domain for these future women leaders. The program is also aligned to the Bank’s global initiative, Futuremakers, to help young people in our communities to learn, earn and grow, which also builds on the organisation’s recent Cyber Security campaign in Singapore targeting young students.
Tags: Data Security Council of IndiaMicrosoftStandard Chartered India
