Unleashing the Future of Cybersecurity: A Day of Exploration & Learning at IWISH

The Cyber Skills team partnered with Industry group Cyber for Schoolgirls to promote cybersecurity as an attractive career option to schoolgirls at the recent IWISH exhibition in Dublin. IWISH is a community committed to showcasing the power of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths to teenage girls.

A focus area of the recently launched Cyber Ireland Cluster Strategy to develop the workforce by promoting cybersecurity careers, pathways, and diversity. Our presence at the I Wish event was to help increase awareness of the cyber industry in Ireland and to work towards achieving the potential to grow the sector by 10,000 people by the year 2030.

We ran an Escape Room challenge for the TY students to participate in, giving them a chance to use the communication, critical thinking, and incident response skills that are needed in the real world for the event of a cyber-attack. The Escape Room is an outreach activity based on a Tabletop exercise, where the students needed to solve challenges related to different company departments in a cyber-attack.

By partnering with Cyber for Schoolgirls the students were able to discuss cybersecurity career paths and study options with Industry professionals. We also promoted the upcoming Cybersecurity Academy to the girls, where they will have a chance to gain a more in-depth understanding of technical cybersecurity skills. This is now open for applications at cyberfutures.ie.

The Cyber Skills Careers project is funded by the Science Foundation Ireland Discover fund, which aims to increase understanding of Science and Technology in society.