About Inclusive Cyber Montréal:

Launched in Montréal in 2018 by Kathy Liu, and led by Maurice Ngwakum Akisa. Inclusive Cyber Montréal is an initiative mobilising non-STEM talent into the cyber security talent pipeline, through leveraging transferable skills from their existing studies. The vision for the project is to build a talent pipeline as diverse as the cybersecurity and technology challenges we face. The project was awarded as Canada’s Top 100 Recovery Projects in 2021, and has since been localised in Kigali and London.

Looking for a way to reframe transferable skills for students from overlooked backgrounds, the hub developed a transferable skills toolkit based on NIST’s National Initiative for Cyber Education (NICE) framework, for students from 15 different backgrounds ranging from Fine Arts, Literature to Political Sciences.

Impact:

• Over half a decade, In Montréal, the hub has coached 1000+ students in breaking into cybersecurity. These workshops took place at some of the largest Canadian universities’ Humanities and Arts faculties, including McGill University, University of Toronto, Concordia University, University of Sherbrooke, UQAM.


• Four students received full bursary for post-graduate cybersecurity certification at Concordia University.


• The project team has also published three thought leadership pieces, including in the Canadian Security Magazine.


• In addition to working with students directly, the project is a key stakeholder representing the youth voice in policy development. In Canada, the project team participated in a consultation with the Canadian Centre for Cybersecurity on university curriculum build.


• The project was a founding project of CyberEco, Québec’s cybersecurity consortium of public and private sector stakeholders.

Montréal Hub goals:

In the short term, the goals focus on empowering students to improve their employability, and find inspiration to make new and meaningful cybersecurity career moves they may not have realised were open to them. In addition to working with students, in the long term, through Québec’s Cybersecurity consortium CyberEco, the hub is working to encourage employers to experiment with their hiring practices to make their workplaces more enticing to non-traditional talent. The is also collaborating with academic institutions to help students from diverse backgrounds to pursue different interests in the cybersecurity and emerging technology sectors.

In 2024 the Montreal hub is seeking to leverage existing communtity partnerships as well as establish new ones that will enable us to encourage private sector employers to further engage with non traditional cyber talent. With the now firmly established global footprint of inclusive cyber, we are looking to engage additional hubs globally to adopt this project, as well as establish regular forums with other hubs that have adapted inclusive cyber to their local realities so that we can draw lessons from one another. With a rejuvinated team we are also looking to create more content (knowlege articles, social media posts) to further inform our local and global ecosystems about the ever evolving cyber security space. 

This project is part of a cross-hub initiative with London I and Kigali hubs. Umbrella project page can be found: https://www.weforum.org/projects/inclusive-cyber-talent