They say “it takes a village to raise a child.” We say “it takes a community to inspire a young person.” No truer word was said as CyNam took on a work experience student for the first time! We were delighted to be joined by Callum from Barnwood Park School.
As a hybrid and tiny team of five people, we knew it would be a challenge conveying the breadth of our industry in just five days, heavy workloads, as well as ensuring the experience was as fulfilling as possible for the student (ahhhh, ok – maybe ourselves too!).
So, we designed a timetable of activities to do over the five days. As well as this, we reached out our community to see where they could help spend time with a student, talk about what they do and (hopefully) inspire them to consider a future in cyber and technology.
So, what did we get up to with our community?
- Talking all things pen testing with Chris from Synack
- Discussing the evolution of a developing investment community with Abby Taylor
- Dan Humphries from Sopra Steria shared his journey into IT
- What makes a kick-ass community spirit with the team at Hub8 – huge shout outs to Cam, Tom and the Hub8 team.
- Meeting successful tech entrepreneurs like Martyn Gill from ORNA Inc
But it has to be said, our favourite day was spent at the Infrastar offices in Gloucester, where Glenn Griffin and his team very generously gave up a whole day of their time to spend with us (and fed us cakes and gave us loads of merch!). We watched a network scanning software run through the office networks and we infiltrated a printer and printed off a smiley face – y’know – just for fun!
Finally, Glenn arranged for an intro to astrophysicist Rob from Braided Communications who has developed a new communication based on deep space communication tools for astronauts, which he demoed.
Our community were brilliant in coming together to support Callum, and we can’t thank all the organisations that helped us enough. If you would like to support an enthusiastic student, please get in touch with us!
But, don’t just take the great feedback from us. Here’s Callum’s feedback about his work experience week:
