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Our mission is to bridge the training, placement and retention gap for the youth in IT and cyber security career paths
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About Us
Cyber Shujaa is a youth-focused capacity development, placement, and incubation Program delivered by a consortium of 3 partner organizations: Serianu Limited, United States International University - Africa (USIU-Africa) and the Kenya Bankers Association (KBA). Simply put, the program bridges youth graduates from academia into industry. It is supported by a matched grant from the Challenge Fund for Youth Employment (CFYE) from the Netherlands.
The Program leverages the different strengths of the consortium members.Serianu, as the cybersecurity industry expert partner, hosts the Program has a secretariat that oversees the overall management of the project to ensure it delivers its objectives. It also provides in-depth insights into the cybersecurity industry to ensure the Program meets market needs. Serianu has guided the design of technical training and participant immersion based on its experience with the Serianu Cyber Immersion Program (SCIP), which has been in operation since 2016.USIU-Africa, as the academic and research partner, plays a unique role in bringing in professors with in-depth knowledge and expertise in cybersecurity, instructional design, pedagogy, curriculum development, certification, research, publication, and project monitoring, evaluation, and learning. As the employer needs liaison partner, the Kenya Bankers Association (KBA) offers vital partner networks for placement and provides market intelligence that has informed curriculum development. KBA's cybersecurity engagement with the other partners in the consortium originated from a research initiative funded by the SWIFT Institute, which assessed cybersecurity risks and best practices for the banking industry in Kenya and across Africa. This research underscored the critical need to close the cybersecurity skills gap and equip graduates with the skills necessary to address industry-specific challenges, particularly in the financial sector, which is highly susceptible to cyber-attacks.
Since its official launch on March 23, 2022, the Program has made remarkable strides in shaping youth employment prospects in cybersecurity and data protection. The primary beneficiaries have been recent graduates who were unemployed, equipping them with the technical and soft skills needed to secure entry-level technology jobs or establishing enterprises to create more jobs.
Our Goal
Here's Our Goals
01
Skills
Upskill 2000 youth in cybersecurity skills (50% female)
02
Decent Jobs
Improve the job decency of 1000 employed youth.
03
Entrepreneurship
Support 30 Cybersecurity entrepreneurs (youth)
04
Academia and Industry
A harmonised cybersecurity employment framework linking the supply (academia) and demand (industry)
Our Courses
Here's what we Offer
Security Analyst Program
The Security Analyst Cohort empowers trainees with practical skills to work as a vulnerability assessor, penetration tester or as a security operations center analyst.
Data Protection Program
The Data Protection Officer Training equips trainees with practical skills to work as a Data governance, Data Protection Officers, and Data Privacy Professional within the organisation.
Cloud security program
The cloud security track addresses a growing workforce demand for cloud security specialists who are grounded well on network and infrastructure security concepts.
Our Story
Here's our Success so far
The Security Analyst Program has had more than 200 graduates, 80 from the first cohort and 120 from the second cohort, with 30% being female, successfully complete a work-readiness program that has equipped them with industry- specific cybersecurity skills and soft skills training.
Students from this program are expected to take up jobs as security analysts, auditors, vulnerability assessors, penetration testers, security operation centre staff, incident responders and forensic investigators.
They would be responsible for analysing an organization's controls by performing technical and non-technical security assessments and preparing reports of their findings with accompanying remediation recommendations to strengthen the security posture of information systems.
The training was delivered online for the last 12 weeks with 80% of the content being practical hands-on labs.
We have partnered with organisations and recruitment firms for job placements. 40 Graduates have already been placed in various organisations ranging from banks, corporate and also consulting firms. More are being called for interviews with the hope of securing employment. We are encouraging them to also apply for online job opportunities from all around the world. Those who want to be self- employed will be taken through a business incubation period that should help them roll out and strengthen their businesses.
For the Data Protection Program there are ninety eight (112) graduates who have gone through the training. We have had three cohorts so far, One in May, the second in June and the third in October.
The Data Protection implementation course was designed to guide individuals to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to serve as a Data Protection Officer (DPO), set up the necessary organisational framework for a Data Protection regime and help organisations ensure compliance with local and international Data Protection Regulations requirements.
The course was run in a hybrid format with physical and four Online Weekly Project feedback sessions. Trainees were from all the 47 Banks and were drawn from Risk, IT, Security, and Compliance or Legal functions for the training.
For the Cloud and Network security Training we celebrate the first graduating cohort of Cloud and Network Security specialists. In the last couple of years, there has been a great push towards cloud adoption. This is because, with cloud computing, organizations are able to roll out systems quickly, with a faster time to market while incurring minimal capital expenditure and having an outsourced model of shared technology services that need to be refreshed at least every 3 years.celebrate the first graduatingcohort of Cloud and NetworkSecurity specialists. In the lastcouple of years, there has beena great push towards cloudadoption. This is because, withcloud computing, organizationsare able to roll out systemsquickly, with a faster time tomarket while incurring minimalcapital expenditure and havingan outsourced model of sharedtechnology services that need tobe refreshed at least every 3 years.
Over the last 12 weeks, we have had immersive hands-on lessons on: how to secure network layers 1 to 7 using a defense-in-depth approach, cloud governance, cloud security architectures, frameworks and best practices for risk management, identity and access management, securing compute services, securing remote access, securing cloud data, DevSecOps, monitoring and incident response.
Specialists graduating from this track will be poised to take up jobs relating to: strategic cloud maturity model adoption, informed shared responsibility, cloud governance, secure architecture design, best practice controls implementation, defense-in-depth security, technical and non-technical risk audits, vulnerability assessments of existing implementations, threat hunting and continuous monitoring of cloud deployments.
This track aims to develop skills on preparation of security assessment and remediation reports that clearly communicate to management in order to strengthen the security posture of cloud deployments while ensuring organizations achieve their business goals.
We have been very privileged to receive support from Microsoft who have provided all 60 participants free access tokens to practice with cloud services on the Microsoft Azure and Dev Ops portals. All graduates from this track will be sponsored with vouchers sit the AZ-500 exam on Microsoft Azure Security Technologies.u
In addition, with the support of USIU-Africa the participants have also been able to take up the Cisco Cloud Security course which will enable them to obtain the vendor- neutal Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge training developed by Cloud Security Alliance.
We truly believe these graduates are going to be top specialists in cloud and network security protecting deployments not just in our region but also across the world.