Tag Archives: training

Working with UK youth and community organisations to tackle the digital divide

Post Syndicated from Tom Hadfield original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/working-with-uk-youth-community-organisations-to-tackle-digital-divide/

At the heart of our work as a charity is the aim to democratise access to digital skills and technologies. Since 2020, we have partnered with over 100 youth and community organisations in the UK to develop programmes that increase opportunities for young people experiencing educational disadvantage to engage and create with digital technology in underserved communities.

Youth organisations attempting to start a coding club can face a range of practical and logistical challenges, from a lack of space, to funding restrictions, and staff shortages. However, the three issues that we hear about most often are a lack of access to hardware, lack of technical expertise among staff, and low confidence to deliver activities on an ongoing basis.

In 2023, we worked to help youth organisations overcome these barriers by designing and delivering a new hybrid training programme, supported by Amazon Future Engineer. With the programme, we aimed to help youth leaders and educators successfully incorporate coding and digital making activities as part of their provision to young people.

“Really useful, I have never used Scratch so going [through] the project made it clear to understand and how I would facilitate this for the children[.]” – Heather Coulthard, Doncaster Children’s University

Participating organisations

We invited 14 organisations from across the UK to participate in the training, based on:

  • The range of frontline services they already provide to young people in underresourced areas (everything from employability skills workshops to literacy classes, food banks, and knife crime awareness schemes)
  • Previous participation in Raspberry Pi Foundation programmes
  • Their commitment to upskill their staff and volunteers and to run sessions with young people on a regular basis following the training

Attendees included a number of previous Learn at Home partners, including Breadline London, Manchester Youth Zone, and Youth Action. They all told us that the additional support they had received from the Foundation and organisations such as The Bloomfield Trust during the coronavirus pandemic had directly inspired them to participate in the training and begin their own coding clubs. 

Online sessions to increase skills and confidence

We started with four online training sessions where we introduced the youth leaders to digital making concepts, programming languages, and recommended activities to run with their young people. This included everything from making their own block-based Scratch games, to running Python programs on our Code Editor and trying out physical computing via our new micro:bit project path.

Alongside digital skills and interactive codealongs, the training also focused on how to be an effective CoderDojo mentor, including classroom management best practice, an explanation of the thinking behind our 3…2…1…Make! project paths, and an overview of culturally relevant pedagogy.

This last part explored how youth leaders can adapt and tailor digital making resources designed for a wide, general audience for their specific groups of young people to aid their understanding, boost their learning outcomes, and increase their sense of belonging within a coding club environment — a common blocker for organisations trying to appeal to marginalised youth.

In-person training to excite and inspire

The training culminated in a day-long, in-person session at our head office in Cambridge, so that youth leaders and educators from each organisation could get hands-on experience. They experimented with physical computing components such as the Raspberry Pi Pico, trained their own artificial intelligence (AI) models using our Experience AI resources, and learned more about how their young people can get involved with Coolest Projects and Astro Pi Mission Zero.

The in-person session also gave everyone the chance to get excited about running digital making activities at their centres: the youth leaders got to ask our team questions, and had the invaluable opportunity to meet each other, share their stories, swap advice, and discuss the challenges they face with their peers.

“Having the in-person immensely improved my skills and knowledge. The instructors were all brilliant and very passionate.” – Awale Elmi, RISE Projects

Continuing support

Finally, thanks to the generous support from Amazon Future Engineer, we were able to equip each participating organisation with Raspberry Pi 400 kits so that the youth leaders can practise and share the skills and knowledge they gained on the course at their centres and the organisations can offer computing activities in-house.

Over the next 12 months, we will continue to work with each of these youth and community organisations, supporting them to establish their coding clubs, and helping to ensure that young people in their communities get a fair and equal opportunity to engage and create with technology, no matter their background or challenges they are facing.

“It was really great. The online courses are excellent and being in-person to get answers to questions really helped. The tinkering was really useful and having people on hand to answer questions [was] massively useful.” – Liam Garnett, Leeds Libraries

For more information about how we can support youth and community organisations in the UK to start their own coding clubs, please send us a message with the subject ‘Partnerships’.

The post Working with UK youth and community organisations to tackle the digital divide appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Training and Skills Development: The Zabbix Advantage

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/training-and-skills-development-the-zabbix-advantage/26873/

At Zabbix, we know that we’ve developed a competitive product. We know it’s very likely the best on the market. Millions of satisfied customers around the world download and use it every day. But that’s not where the story ends.

It’s critical to us that our customers know how to use our product to its full potential in order to get the most value out of it. That’s why we take ongoing training and skills development so seriously, and why we work hard to equip our users with knowledge that’s designed to increase their productivity and performance.

We’ve got years of experience seeing what works and doesn’t work when it comes to showing our users how to get the most out of Zabbix. We’ve learned how to make complicated concepts simple, how to adjust to a wide variety of cultures and learning styles, and how to build courses that create happier, more productive, and more satisfied users.

Let’s take a look at what we’ve identified as 5 of our best training and development practices, and how they help to make sure that the information we present in our training sessions sticks with our users and helps them get as much value from Zabbix as they possibly can.

Perform an effective training and skills development needs analysis

Quality training and skills development begins with a needs analysis. This is a process that organizations use to determine the gap between the current and desired knowledge, skills, and abilities of end users. It typically involves determining the root cause for a training request, identifying the needed outcomes, and uncovering the best learning approach.

An effective needs analysis addresses questions like these:

  • Which of our users need training the most?
  • What kind of training do they require?
  • How can we best design an effective training program for them?
  • What will be the impact of training on their experience with Zabbix?
  • What level of investment and resources will be required to implement an effective training program for them?

At Zabbix, we ask ourselves these questions and many others before creating new training courses or modifying existing ones. We take into account our users’ backgrounds, including their education and work experience. We are always trying to speak to their experiences and offer content in a language that’s easy for them to understand. Our ultimate goal is to make our training sessions feel relevant to everyone, no matter their level of Zabbix experience.

Once we know who we’re speaking to, we can identify the areas where users may be struggling. We focus on what our users are motivated by and what tasks they seem to stumble over the most, and we know that showing users how our training can positively impact their careers will go a long way toward creating a receptive audience for the information we’re presenting.

Build targeted and customized courses

There’s no such thing as one-size-fits-all when it comes to training and skills development. As the world and technology change, knowing which training methods to implement can be a challenge. Businesses, educators, and learners all have unique learning approaches, and tailoring a custom training program creates balance for effective learning experiences.

The Zabbix method is to create a different course for every skill level and potential user of our services, creating an official Zabbix certified training path that guides our users toward the goal of becoming a Zabbix certified expert.

We start by making sure we’ve clearly identified our target audience, so that we can create content that’s relevant and engaging. For example, in our Zabbix Certified Expert and Zabbix Certified Professional courses, we know that users already have a baseline of knowledge, so we don’t need to provide a lot of background or general information. Understanding our audience helps us keep the content concise and to the point.

From there, we focus on structuring our content. For us, this means keeping training and development focused on a single skill level and keeping content short and to the point. Once we have our “big picture” outline, we work with our trainers to plan out the format, key takeaways, and activities.

That brings us to our final point –providing a truly hands-on experience. We know that it’s critical for learners to be able to quickly apply what they’ve been taught, so we include at least one activity per section of a course, allowing learners to put their new skills to the test by performing practical tasks and solving real-life use cases. This approach is borne out by the fact that our labs are consistently rated by students as among their favorite aspects of the training experience.

Provide quality, professional materials

Experience shows that it’s vitally important to focus on providing training materials that are:

  • Professional in appearance AND user-friendly
  • Available before, during, and after class to reinforce the learning process
  • Aligned with the course objectives
  • Easy to access (including print or online options)

Every student who attends a Zabbix course gets the course presentation as well as the lab manual containing the practical tasks and their solutions. When it comes to the presentation, we go to great lengths to make sure we know our learners and write for them, using accessible, approachable language and keeping things simple and to the point at all times.

Have qualified and experienced instructors

Most people don’t recall a lot of details from specific lectures they attended in high school, but it’s very likely that they remember the name of their favorite teacher. Instructors have a massive impact on how adults learn as well.

Effective trainers continuously practice and develop qualities that improve their understanding of what learners and organizations need. They understand that the more they exercise these qualities, the better equipped they’ll be to deliver engaging trainings that create an active learning atmosphere and incorporate current learning trends.

Every Zabbix Certified trainer works with the tool on a daily basis, so they’ve got plenty of hands-on use cases, hacks, workarounds, and shortcuts to share. They understand that a quality training session is a continuous feedback loop between learners and an instructor, so they listen actively and encourage engagement through the use of activities and Q&A sessions throughout our courses.

In addition to their demonstrated knowledge of all things Zabbix, our trainers also bring to the table strong interpersonal skills and a passion for what they do. That’s why nearly all the feedback we receive highlights the expertise and professionalism of our trainers as a high point of the training experience.

Assess training and skills development effectiveness

Training effectiveness measures the impact of training on a learner’s knowledge, skills, and performance. It needs to measure not only what employees learn but how they apply it in their jobs. It should also determine whether the training truly benefits users, while uncovering any issues in the training process that need to be improved.

Zabbix takes a two-track approach to measuring the effectiveness of training and skills development. We incorporate assessments into all our training courses and ask for feedback post-session to help us understand what each user learned, but we also depend on a system of certifications that are backed up by exams.

A Zabbix certification is our guarantee that a certificate holder has mastered the theoretical and practical skills covered during a course. Participants must score 80% or higher to pass any exam, which is why they stand as concrete proof that a certificate holder has the required knowledge to understand the concepts presented in a training session and implement them in real Zabbix environments.

Conclusion

Zabbix has a wide variety of users, so we need to offer a wide variety of courses to meet their needs. Our training programs are intended for IT administrators, auditors, system integrators, and anyone else who deals with IT infrastructure monitoring.

We’re proud of the fact that even veteran administrators with several years of Zabbix experience come away from our trainings armed with inside knowledge of new features and best practices.
To find out more about our comprehensive suite of trainings and find the one that’s right for you or your organization, visit zabbix.com/training.

 

 

The post Training and Skills Development: The Zabbix Advantage appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

See yourself in cyber: Highlights from Cybersecurity Awareness Month

Post Syndicated from CJ Moses original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/see-yourself-in-cyber-highlights-from-cybersecurity-awareness-month/

As Cybersecurity Awareness Month comes to a close, we want to share some of the work we’ve done and made available to you throughout October. Over the last four weeks, we have shared insights and resources aligned with this year’s theme—”See Yourself in Cyber”—to help advance awareness training, and inspire people to join the rapidly growing security industry. Here are a few highlights.

Roundtable with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA): Amazon Chief Security Officer Steve Schmidt hosted CISA director Jen Easterly in Seattle for a roundtable with leaders across higher education, state and local government, and private industry to discuss ways to develop the cybersecurity workforce through skills training, partnerships between government and industry, and creating pathways to cybersecurity careers.

How AWS, Cisco, Netflix & SAP Are Approaching Cybersecurity Awareness Month. I joined Cisco Chief Security and Trust Officer Brad Arkin, Netflix Head of Cloud Security Srinath Kuruvardi, and SAP Chief Trust Officer Elena Kvochko to describe how AWS, Cisco, Netflix, and SAP are instilling strong cybersecurity training and practices within our organizations, with the goal of inspiring other organizations to do the same.

Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2022 Briefing. Amazon Security Director Jenny Brinkley—who leads Amazon’s internal and external awareness training activities—participated in a Cybersecurity Awareness Month panel discussion hosted by the National Cybersecurity Alliance. Jenny met with executives from KnowBe4, Google, NortonLifeLock, and Dell and chatted about how the cybersecurity landscape has changed over the past few years, and how those changes have impacted the perception of security as a part of daily life.

Making Cybersecurity Relevant for Consumers: The Case for Personal Agency. In addition to the briefing, Jenny spoke to the National Cybersecurity Alliance about staying safe online. She highlighted simple steps that everyone can take to be safer online, including staying consistent on software updates for connected devices, using strong passwords, activating multi-factor authentication (MFA) on accounts when possible, and being on the lookout for phishing attempts.

National Cybersecurity Alliance and Nasdaq Cybersecurity Summit. Jenny and Amazon Head of Global Security Training Jyllian Clarke also joined the National Cybersecurity Alliance, Nasdaq, and public and private sector security leaders in New York City for a cybersecurity summit and got to ring the opening bell.

Resources

AWS offers free Cybersecurity Awareness Training to individuals and businesses around the world, and we’re providing complimentary MFA security keys to AWS account owners in the United States. More than 40 security-focused courses are available through AWS Skill Builder, ranging from foundational to advanced content. By subscribing to AWS Skill Builder, you gain access to security-related interactive challenges with AWS Jam, which guides you through solving real-world problems.

Additionally, Amazon and the National Cybersecurity Alliance launched a cybersecurity awareness campaign called Protect & Connect. The campaign includes a public service announcement featuring Prime Video actor Michael B. Jordan and actress-producer Tessa Thompson as “internet bodyguards,” as well as a Protect & Connect microsite for consumers, featuring additional videos on topics such as MFA and how to identify and avoid phishing attempts.

Humanizing security

Cybersecurity can seem like a complex subject but ultimately, it’s all about people. Most of today’s threats need people to activate them, so you need to train people to develop intuition, which is something that can’t be automated. By meeting employees where they are with an engaging approach to awareness training that moves security to the forefront of everything they do, you can promote positive behavioral change, and start building a security-first culture.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.

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CJ Moses

CJ Moses

CJ is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at AWS, where he leads product design and security engineering. His mission is to deliver the economic and security benefits of cloud computing to business and government customers. Previously, CJ led the technical analysis of computer and network intrusion efforts at the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation Cyber Division. He also served as a Special Agent with the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). CJ led several computer intrusion investigations seen as foundational to the information security industry today.

Three ways to improve your cybersecurity awareness program

Post Syndicated from Stephen Schmidt original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/three-ways-to-improve-your-cybersecurity-awareness-program/

Raising the bar on cybersecurity starts with education. That’s why we announced in August that Amazon is making its internal Cybersecurity Awareness Training Program available to businesses and individuals for free starting this month. This is the same annual training we provide our employees to help them better understand and anticipate potential cybersecurity risks. The training program will include a getting started guide to help you implement a cybersecurity awareness training program at your organization. It’s aligned with NIST SP 800-53rev4, ISO 27001, K-ISMS, RSEFT, IRAP, OSPAR, and MCTS.

I also want to share a few key learnings for how to implement effective cybersecurity training programs that might be helpful as you develop your own training program:

  1. Be sure to articulate personal value. As humans, we have an evolved sense of physical risk that has developed over thousands of years. Our bodies respond when we sense danger, heightening our senses and getting us ready to run or fight. We have a far less developed sense of cybersecurity risk. Your vision doesn’t sharpen when you assign the wrong permissions to a resource, for example. It can be hard to describe the impact of cybersecurity, but if you keep the message personal, it engages parts of the brain that are tied to deep emotional triggers in memory. When we describe how learning a behavior—like discerning when an email might be phishing—can protect your family, your child’s college fund, or your retirement fund, it becomes more apparent why cybersecurity matters.
  2. Be inclusive. Humans are best at learning when they share a lived experience with their educators so they can make authentic connections to their daily lives. That’s why inclusion in cybersecurity training is a must. But that only happens by investing in a cybersecurity awareness team that includes people with different backgrounds, so they can provide insight into different approaches that will resonate with diverse populations. People from different cultures, backgrounds, and age cohorts can provide insight into culturally specific attack patterns as well as how to train for them. For example, for social engineering in hierarchical cultures, bad actors often spoof authority figures, and for individualistic cultures, they play to the target’s knowledge and importance, and give compliments. And don’t forget to make everything you do accessible for people with varying disability experiences, because everyone deserves the same high-quality training experience. The more you connect with people, the more they internalize your message and provide valuable feedback. Diversity and inclusion breeds better cybersecurity.
  3. Weave it into workflows. Training takes investment. You have to make time for it in your day. We all understand that as part of a workforce we have to do it, but in addition to compliance training, you should be providing just-in-time reminders and challenges to complete. Try working with tooling teams to display messaging when critical tasks are being completed. Make training short and concise—3 minutes at most—so that people can make time for it in their day.

Cybersecurity training isn’t just a once-per-year exercise. Find ways to weave it into the daily lives of your workforce, and you’ll be helping them protect not only your company, but themselves and their loved ones as well.

Get started by going to learnsecurity.amazon.com and take the Cybersecurity Awareness training.

Want more AWS Security how-to content, news, and feature announcements? Follow us on Twitter.

Steve Schmidt

Steve is Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer for AWS. His duties include leading product design, management, and engineering development efforts focused on bringing the competitive, economic, and security benefits of cloud computing to business and government customers. Prior to AWS, he had an extensive career at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he served as a senior executive and section chief. He currently holds 11 patents in the field of cloud security architecture. Follow Steve on Twitter.

Introducing new self-paced courses to improve Java and Python code quality with Amazon CodeGuru

Post Syndicated from Rafael Ramos original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/new-self-paced-courses-to-improve-java-and-python-code-quality-with-amazon-codeguru/

Amazon CodeGuru icon

During the software development lifecycle, organizations have adopted peer code reviews as a common practice to keep improving code quality and prevent bugs from reaching applications in production. Developers traditionally perform those code reviews manually, which causes bottlenecks and blocks releases while waiting for the peer review. Besides impacting the teams’ agility, it’s a challenge to maintain a high bar for code reviews during the development workflow. This is especially challenging for less experienced developers, who have more difficulties identifying defects, such as thread concurrency and resource leaks.

With Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer, developers have an automated code review tool that catches critical issues, security vulnerabilities, and hard-to-find bugs during application development. CodeGuru Reviewer is powered by pre-trained machine learning (ML) models and uses millions of code reviews on thousands of open-source and Amazon repositories. It also provides recommendations on how to fix issues to improve code quality and reduces the time it takes to fix bugs before they reach customer-facing applications. Java and Python developers can simply add Amazon CodeGuru to their existing development pipeline and save time and reduce the cost and burden of bad code.

If you’re new to writing code or an experienced developer looking to automate code reviews, we’re excited to announce two new courses on CodeGuru Reviewer. These courses, developed by the AWS Training and Certification team, consist of guided walkthroughs, gaming elements, knowledge checks, and a final course assessment.

About the course

During these courses, you learn how to use CodeGuru Reviewer to automatically scan your code base, identify hard-to-find bugs and vulnerabilities, and get recommendations for fixing the bugs and security issues. The course covers CodeGuru Reviewer’s main features, provides a peek into how CodeGuru finds code anomalies, describes how its ML models were built, and explains how to understand and apply its prescriptive guidance and recommendations. Besides helping on improving the code quality, those recommendations are useful for new developers to learn coding best practices, such as refactor duplicated code, correct implementation of concurrency constructs, and how to avoid resource leaks.

The CodeGuru courses are designed to be completed within a 2-week time frame. The courses comprise 60 minutes of videos, which include 15 main lectures. Four of the lectures are specific to Java, and four focus on Python. The courses also include exercises and assessments at the end of each week, to provide you with in-depth, hands-on practice in a lab environment.

Week 1

During the first week, you learn the basics of CodeGuru Reviewer, including how you can benefit from ML and automated reasoning to perform static code analysis and identify critical defects from coding best practices. You also learn what kind of actionable recommendations CodeGuru Reviewer provides, such as refactoring, resource leak, potential race conditions, deadlocks, and security analysis. In addition, the course covers how to integrate this tool on your development workflow, such as your CI/CD pipeline.

Topics include:

  • What is Amazon CodeGuru?
  • How CodeGuru Reviewer is trained to provide intelligent recommendations
  • CodeGuru Reviewer recommendation categories
  • How to integrate CodeGuru Reviewer into your workflow

Week 2

Throughout the second week, you have the chance to explore CodeGuru Reviewer in more depth. With Java and Python code snippets, you have a more hands-on experience and dive into each recommendation category. You use these examples to learn how CodeGuru Reviewer looks for duplicated lines of code to suggest refactoring opportunities, how it detects code maintainability issues, and how it prevents resource leaks and concurrency bugs.

Topics include (for both Java and Python):

  • Common coding best practices
  • Resource leak prevention
  • Security analysis

Get started

Developed at the source, this new digital course empowers you to learn about CodeGuru from the experts at AWS whenever, wherever you want. Advance your skills and knowledge to build your future in the AWS Cloud. Enroll today:

Rafael Ramos

Rafael Ramos

Rafael is a Solutions Architect at AWS, where he helps ISVs on their journey to the cloud. He spent over 13 years working as a software developer, and is passionate about DevOps and serverless. Outside of work, he enjoys playing tabletop RPG, cooking and running marathons.