CyberKali

CyberKali is a set of West Midlands based educational engagement activities designed to encourage young female career decision maker students to invest in cyber security as a real career option, and to create opportunities for existing female cyber security students to lead on planning, organising, and delivering events and acting as role models for younger females. The project is delivered through an alliance between the University of Warwick and Aston University and draws in several inner-city schools.

CyberKali is delivered by a nationally leading consortium of the University of Warwick ACE-CSE and Aston Cyber Security Innovation Centre (CSI) in close collaboration with employers, recruiters, UK Cyber Security Council, the Ethnic Minorities in Cyber (EMiC) network, and several Birmingham based schools. The programme of activities is designed to: attract diverse learner cohorts; provide them with unique in-class cyber skills experiences; and provide exposure to resilient pathways to education and work particularly from the ethnic minorities background, into the cyber security careers. Aston has a particularly well represented ethnic minority population, and the project has the ancillary benefit of attracting this demographic to the events.

CyberKali is designed to be collaborative. Our collective expertise ensures that each step of the education journey (engagement, learning and pathway to education and employment) is outstanding and ensures that we are stronger than a single university working alone. CyberKali bootcamps provide a unique opportunity to make use of an existing partnership of employers and universities with regional strength. The CyberKali team are building on rich experience and can deliver bootcamps at pace and at scale without substantial start-up cost or delay.

The specific objectives of the project are to:

• Support females from non-technical backgrounds to understand the cyber security challenges brought by our digital world and the professional opportunities being formed.
• Deliver networking, mentoring and recruitment multiplier events inviting young females in the West Midlands at career decision making stages to consider cyber security as career choice.
• Highlighting career pathways within cyber through talks and exposure to role models working within the cyber industry in the region.
• Capture the experiences of cyber-ambassadors, and event attendees to understand the motivators and inhibitors to entering cyber security from a female perspective.
• Contribute to a framework/model which highlights strategies for attracting more females into the cyber security profession.

The PIs involves with this project are:

Dr. Harjinder Singh Lallie (University of Warwick)

Professor Vladlena Benson (University of Aston)

Dr. Anitha Chinnaswamy (University of Aston)

Mrs. Elizabeth Titis (University of Warwick)