Latin America. WOMCY Latam Women in Cybersecurity signed an agreement with Fortinet to enter its global Fortinet Network Security Academy (FNSA) vocational training program. This agreement aims to help reduce the gap of trained professionals and promote greater diversity in the cybersecurity industry in Latin America, through the training and certification of WOMCY members in Fortinet's Network Security Expert (NSE) courses.
"As leaders in cybersecurity in the region, we are committed to providing training that will close the skills gap in our industry and help the market have the qualified professionals it needs," said Pedro Paixao, fortinet's general manager and VP for Latin America. "We are very excited to add WOMCY to our global program that today has more than 75 affiliated educational institutions in the region. The alliance with WOMCY also allows us to bring our training offer to dozens of professional women in Latin America, increasing their opportunities for labor insertion and collaborating with the promotion of greater diversity and inclusion in our sector," he added.
"Cybersecurity is part of the operational resilience of businesses and the World Economic Forum recognizes that this area is one of the most important issues facing the world today and, in recent years, has consistently ranked attack disruptions as the most significant risk facing business and government leaders. However, there is a lack of professionals and diversity in cybersecurity to accompany this scenario and, in this sense, the alliance between WOMCY and Fortinet is very strategic for us to join forces and minimize this gap more and more, "said Vanessa Padua, leader for Latin America of the WOMCY Talent program.
According to the report 'Fortinet Survey Finds Widespread Impact of Cybersecurity Skills Shortage', 68% of organizations struggle to recruit, hire and retain cybersecurity talent, while 73% had at least one intrusion/breach during the last year that can be partially attributed to a breach in cybersecurity skills. In addition, according to data from the Organization of American States (OAS), only 11% of women working in the technology industry focus on cybersecurity. In Latin America this figure reaches only 8% and only 1% hold executive positions.
"At Fortinet we have the largest team of security experts in the region. Therefore, we are very committed to promoting the growing trend of gender diversity in our teams. Today we have more than 100 women experts who occupy positions of engineers, commercial executives in all countries, country managers and regional sales directors. We firmly believe that being an innovative company also means being an example of a culture of diversity and helping more women choose a career in the cybersecurity industry," said Elisa Ball, Fortinet's Director of Human Resources for Latin America.
The Fortinet Network Security Academy (FNSA) program aims to provide a cybersecurity certification to students from organizations, schools, and universities around the world so that they can successfully enter the job market. Upon completion of the FNSA program, WOMCY students will have industry-leading knowledge, backed by a recognized international professional certification as an important career differential.
"We will provide exclusive access to our members to advanced Network Security Expert (NSE) training and certifications, involving different disciplines that are part of the knowledge that we, cybersecurity professionals, have to look for as differentials," Padua added.
The program was launched internally on Monday, January 11 with the 'Become a WOMCYHero NSE4' campaign, exclusively for WOMCY CyberMaster members, in which they will receive access to Fortinet's NSE training platform, where they can start online training for the NSE1, NSE2 and NSE4 exams. Once the course is completed, they will receive, totally free, the voucher equivalent to US$400 for the NSE4 certification exam. This campaign will be valid until April 30, 2021.
Those interested in becoming a WOMCY CyberMaster and accessing the 'NSE4 WOMCYHero' program can enter www.womcy.org and complete the registration process.
