Nationwide Building Society said it wants to add cyber security training to its programme, which has fast-tracked more than 300 graduates in nine years.
Working with cyber training specialist Capslock, Nationwide said that through the cyber security-focused training, it wants to expand the number of UK cyber experts, increase the team’s diversity and create a cyber-first culture.
Capslock will help Nationwide onboard, train and allocate those trained into the cyber security function. The training organisation’s founder and CEO, Andrea Cullen, said the programme helped cyber security professionals understand their adversaries. “To combat threat actors, you must be able to think like one,” she said. “That’s why the UK’s cyber resilience relies heavily on diversity of experience, background and thinking.”
Cullen said learners don’t need to have a technical background. “They can be graduates and career-changers with a passion for cyber and valuable transferable skills from other life experiences,” she said.
Participants will undergo 16 weeks training towards becoming Certified Cyber Security Practitioners with Ce-CSP certifications.
One banking IT specialist who has worked in cyber security at large banks echoed Cullen’s comments on the importance of understanding cyber criminals. “It’s two sides of the same coin, which is why quite a lot of former hackers have ended up working in cyber security,” they said. “They know the tricks. You do need to think like the cyber criminals, because they are always trying to find the weakest link.
They said the challenge facing banks was immense, and that they were in a never-ending battle with cyber criminals. “Being a cyber security chief at a bank is a thankless task,” they said. “I don’t recall ever having particular trouble recruiting cyber security experts, but that’s partly because we probably underestimated how many we needed.”
Simulating problems
According to Nationwide, the course simulates the real cyber security workplace, and encourages a team and problem-based approach.
David Boda, chief security and resilience officer at Nationwide, which has about 18,000 staff over 16 million customers, said the programme will help the UK cyber security sector as well as the building society’s own security.
“There’s always something new to learn when you work in cyber, but this makes staying ahead of the threat landscape challenging,” he said. “You need different perspectives if you want to succeed. We feel that companies like Nationwide have a responsibility to help develop the UK’s cyber security skillset. That’s why we’ve partnered with Capslock – to bring more diversity not just into the company, but into the UK cyber industry as a whole.”
Demand for cyber security skills is going unfulfilled. Just last week, the National Audit Office revealed that the biggest risk to making the UK government resilient to cyber attack was a deep skills gap. It said a third of cyber security roles in government were vacant or filled by temporary – and more expensive – staff in 2023-24, while more than half of cyber roles in several departments were vacant, and 70% of specialist security architects were on temporary contracts.
Capslock said that since it launched in 2021, over 1,000 people have been trained, graduated and started cyber security jobs.
Chris Skinner, CEO of The Finanser, said people with cyber security skills in the finance sector were valuable to wider business sectors. “Where else would you look for cyber security expertise than in the industry that gets the most hacks and attacks?” he said.
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