Join Us in Supporting the CyberFirst Programme

By Andy Bates


The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) has been a proud supporter of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) CyberFirst Programme.

The programme focuses on several areas, including increasing gender diversity in cyber in the UK, encouraging more 15-year-olds to consider cyber options, and sponsoring summer interns and bursary placements. Andy Bates, GCA’s Executive Director in the UK, visited three universities in the UK to talk to 50 students at a time about cyber career options. GCA also hosted five summer students (paid for by NCSC), and was surprised by the quality of the students who worked on tasks such as developing code, testing the toolkit, and working with partners such as Smarter Not Harder (SNH) & Redsift. They even produced some code for the City of London Police to help make some of the officers more effective in crime website takedown.

We recommend that all of our UK partners take advantage of this scheme, as it provides high quality resources while giving both parties a feeling of achievement and different insights.

The author, Andy Bates, is the Executive Director of the United Kingdom, Middle East and India for the Global Cyber Alliance. You can follow him on Twitter @andycyberbates or connect with him on LinkedIn.