New academy to bridge Australia’s cyber skills gap

Described as Australia’s largest private sector commitment to cyber security training, CyberCX will deliver the industry 500 new professionals in three years.

CyberCX executives Rosemary Driscoll and John Paitaridis. Picture: supplied.

A new cyber security recruitment program is promising to deliver 500 cyber security professionals into the sector over the next three years, in what is being dubbed as the nation’s single largest private sector commitment to cyber security training.

Cyber security services provider CyberCX is launching the CyberCX Academy on Wednesday, a program that will pull candidates from university and TAFE as well as Australians looking to re-enter the workforce. Participants in the six-month program will be paid a pro-rata salary of $67,000 per year, and will ‘hit the tools’ after just 14 weeks, according to chief executive John Paitaridis.

“This is much bigger than us just supporting our own growth needs, which continue to be significant. This is about making a real contribution to addressing the cyber skill shortage that’s holding back the cyber sector, and in to a large extent holding back the economy as well,” Mr Paitaridis, the former managing director of Optus, said in an interview.

“Our view is we need a fundamental mind shift away from competing for the same scarce cyber talent, and we’re doing that by investing in training and development for new cyber security professionals from a range of backgrounds and experiences.”

Australia is facing an acute cyber skills shortage amid a heightened geopolitical landscape. The CyberCX Academy’s Director, Rosemary Driscoll, said the program will have targets for under-represented groups in cyber security, including women. Her company currently has a workforce of about 1000 cyber security professionals.

Statistics from RMIT show that less than 15 per cent of workers in the cyber security industry are women, making it the industry with the biggest gender gap.

“The cyber security industry needs to make itself more attractive and more accessible to a wider range of workers. We believe the CyberCX Academy will achieve this,“ she said.

“The inaugural CyberCX Academy cohort includes a former chemist, a retail worker, and a teacher alongside university and TAFE graduates … It’s a group as diverse as the community we seek to safeguard and serve.

“It’s going to run in capital cities right across Australia and what’s exciting and different about the curriculum is it’s based on what our technical specialists are seeing in the real world.”

The program will be fully funded by CyberCX, Mr Paitaridis said, and will go some way towards filling the estimated 7000-strong gap in Australia’s local cyber security workforce.

Similar programs exist from the likes of Deloitte and Microsoft but CyberCX says those programs run for up to 36 months, and often lump students with HELP loans.

Graduates will be trained up in certifications and skills across security testing, cloud security, cyber governance, risk and compliance, identity management, digital forensics and incident response.

“We see this as a material contribution towards meeting Australia‘s short-term need and demands,” he said. “This is particularly important as we think about the sovereignty of the country, and the current threats on our critical infrastructure. Threats have been increasing from nation states and threat actors, including ransomware groups, and we have to ultimately build a national capability to support the country.”