DARING to be Digital

By Jackie Galbraith, Principal and Chief Executive of West Lothian College

Digital is disrupting how we do business and, to be successful in this information age, organisations need to embrace the changes arising from developments in technology.

Critical to achieving this potential is our future tech talent, including computing students at West Lothian College. Their skills will be vital in enabling companies in every sector of the economy to benefit from the impact of Big Data, the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0.

However, the many thousands of high value digital jobs available in Scotland can only be filled if an increasing number of people choose to develop

the skills required. Schools, colleges and universities need to generate more interest in digital careers, particularly amongst young people.

To inspire more young people at school to choose courses which develop digital skills we offer two qualifications for secondary school pupils in fifth and sixth year – the Foundation Apprenticeship IT: Software Development, and HNC Computing.

We need to persuade many more young women on why they should choose a career in tech. I graduated with a computing degree in the early 1990s and entered an industry in which it was very obvious that I was in a minority. Sadly, despite the preponderance of initiatives over the last three decades to encourage girls and women to study, build a career and stay in tech, time has pretty much stood still in relation to the proportion of females in the sector which continues to be maledominated with only 18% of tech roles held by women.

Earlier this year the second annual progress report on the Scottish Funding Council’s Gender Action Plan demonstrated progress in improving the gender balance in subjects like engineering in colleges and universities. However, computing has not improved, indeed in some areas it is worse. We are working with partners and industry through the West Lothian Regional STEM Hub to tackle this gender imbalance.

West Lothian College offers a wide range of industry relevant computing courses. In August we opened a bespoke cyber security lab which provides students with state of the art technology and access to industry specialists. This new facility has been developed in liaison with experts locally and further afield. We've added HNC Cyber Security to our course portfolio and HND Cyber Security will be introduced in August 2020.

The college has worked with Edinburgh Napier University to ensure that our courses fit well with their degrees, which means that graduating HNC and HND students will have the opportunity to go straight from college into third year of a relevant degree at the university.

National Progression Awards (NPAs) assess skills and knowledge in specialist vocational areas and link to national occupational standards and we have included NPA Cyber Security in a range of computing courses for the past five years. We also offer this as an evening class, which attracts school leavers as well as employees in a number of local companies.

Computing lecturer, Ross Tunnicliffe, has led on the college’s cyber security developments. Ross said: “Cyber security is a major growth area at the moment. All businesses big and small are at risk of cyber attacks and we want to play our part in ensuring that the next generation of cyber security experts are trained well to address these. This is not just about teaching technology and techniques, it is also about the ethics behind using these techniques in a professional and law abiding manner.”

Former West Lothian College student, Den Jones is now Director of Enterprise Security at Adobe in San Jose, California. According to Den:

The cyber field is an amazing industry filled with crazy people, personalities and stories of how dark the web and world is. While it sounds depressing, it’s such a rush to be part of such an amazing industry. There’s never a day goes by when I don’t learn from amazing people around the world and realise this field enables anything.