Our Future in Eternally Youthful Safe Hands

APMG International have benefited tremendously from six CyberFirst bursary summer placement students in the last 4 years. We have had incredible students and their ability to absorb ideas and deliver results at pace is a joy and a huge benefit to organizations involved in the scheme. A previous student of ours even won ‘The Best Industry Summer Placement for 2018’ for their APMG placement project. Beyond their technical competence, they have also addressed business level problems including  researching state-of-the art problems in cybersecurity, learning about cybersecurity people, processes, technology and cultures whilst picking up transferable skills including communicating technical subjects to our C-level executives. 

This year our students developed a data science programme to streamline the mapping of training courses against the emerging Cyber Body of Knowledge (CyBoK) that supports the GCHQ Certified Training (GCT) programme of accrediting quality cybersecurity training courses. A second project used machine learning to help predict cybersecurity solutions to requirements, cool stuff. In both cases providing capabilities relevant to many knowledge areas and on the cutting edge of robotic process automation, the frontier for productivity improvements.  The key point about this and artificial intelligence (AI) is that they are allowing us to do things at scale and pace that simply would not be possible, nor affordable, using human effort alone Not replacing human resources but allowing us to do more. This year we’re taking on additional staff as a result, real growth through productivity.

On reflection my own mentoring was amazing, thank you to those who supported my real first taste of problems in industry – you know who you are. The hour or so a week they provided I now see as something to be very grateful for, and for what I hope to inspire in the next generation of cybersecurity prodigies.  For today I see how working with these students allows us to escape the day to day delivery of business as usual and think ahead. To free our thoughts to the art of the possible and more. To amplify what we can achieve working together.

…And this is fun, invigorating!

I remember what it was like to experiment. To try things with no pressure and accepting that an idea may or may not work, but learning a whole heap along the journey. That experimental journey is as fun now as when I was a kid, a life affirming pleasure together with young professionals.

DeepMind has a podcast, an eye opener into the future. Where intelligence and experimentation are core to the development of safe AI. They describe intelligence, a definition for human and machines, “Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments” S.Legg, M.Hutter,Dec 2007

Yet this version seems not to allow for creating intelligence thinking forward, rather learning from what we already know. This is perhaps not the intelligence of inspiration and intuition, although I might be wrong. The joy of working with our youth is they do not know what they don’t know, inspiration through learning hands on abounds, thankfully AI machines aren’t yet able to do this (fingers crossed) and we get the joy of working collectively making our own inspirational jumps.

 The benefits to APMG are clear, and so to the students. The NCSC have stated “Hosting Cyber First students provides them with fantastic experiences and development opportunities, as well as providing hosts with valuable insights into their skills and abilities”, and we couldn’t agree more. I suggest that additionally for similar small medium enterprises to APMG, you have at the coalface hard problems left, right and centre, while not being encumbered by the large organizational treacle. These bright young minds can help you solve these problems and raise your productivity in relative terms almost overnight. Why wouldn’t you want to have a CyberFirst placement student, a vocational student or apprentice?

It is, for sure, worthwhile and we can thoroughly recommend you go for it.

#NCSAM FREE Webinar - Cybersecurity advice for small organizations [24th October]

NCSAM Blog #1 - Tackling Cyber Security Early 

Applications for the CyberFirst Bursary Scheme are open until 11th November