Leading business and financial adviser Grant Thornton UK LLP is pleased to announce a new partnership with Immersive Labs, the highly acclaimed UK cyber security start-up, to help further advance the Digital Cyber Academy (DCA).
DCA is a cloud-based cyber security identification and upskilling platform that encourages full or part-time students around the world to develop cyber security skills by immersing them in real-world exercises. Employers can then identify highly skilled and engaged users to fill relevant roles and help narrow the UK’s growing cyber security skills gap.
With gamification at the heart of every lab exercise, users are rewarded with points for every lab completed which are then displayed on a leaderboard table. The more labs completed the higher up the leaderboard users rise and the more tailored skill sets they gain.
Operated by Immersive Labs, the platform aims to widen the talent pool of individuals interested in cyber security and is accessible free-of-charge to students from any learning institution (further and higher learning courses). The platform anonymises users’ academic and social backgrounds, to help remove unconscious bias from the initial stages of the recruitment process. The programme, the Cyber 1000 initiative, aims to identify and develop one-thousand cyber security practitioners by the end of 2020.
Justin Rix, partner at Grant Thornton UK LLP, commented: “The growing threat of cybercrime and related security breaches is something that keeps many corporate and government leaders awake at night, as finding the right people to protect their organisations against current and future threats is proving a considerable challenge. With this partnership, we’re confident that more people from non-technical or computing backgrounds will test their potential and explore a career path in this fast-growing field.
“The ability to support and encourage people from a diverse range of backgrounds is something which we, as a firm, feel very strongly about and believe sits firmly at the heart of our purpose to shape a vibrant economy. Immersive Labs shares many of the values that Grant Thornton prides itself on when it comes to finding socially inclusive solutions to critical business issues, and we see this partnership as the start of an exciting journey which could see similar initiatives focused on other segments of the population which might not have considered this career choice or are looking to re-skill in order to remain competitive in today’s labour market.”
James Hadley, CEO and founder of Immersive Labs, added: “We are incredibly excited to be partnering with Grant Thornton. The Immersive Labs Academies make learning about the intricacies of practical cyber security as un-daunting, dynamic and relevant as possible, whoever the end user is. Identifying hidden talent is key to increasing diversity and growing cyber teams at pace. It’s so encouraging to have a well-respected organisation like Grant Thornton get on board with our approach to plugging the cyber skills gap.”
For more information on the Digital Cyber Academy, please follow this link.
For more information on Immersive Labs, please follow this link.
For more information on Grant Thornton UK LLP’s cyber security capabilities, please .
