Today a second cohort of Cybersecurity Training for Higher-Tier Global Digital Services Skills was held in Belmopan. The first session was held in Belize City on Monday and today the Director of the Investment Policy and Compliance Unit at the Ministry of Finance explained how they were able to expand it to 50 more Belizeans.
Lincoln Blake, Director, Investment Policy and Compliance Unit
"The objective was to transition the BPO sector into the Global Digital Services Sector and the two projects, one entails development of policy, which we got through a loan from the IDB and another one is getting higher tiered training for the BPO sector because we're trying to move the BPO sector into a more complex and what we call higher tier services. So we identified 8 different types of services Belize would be competitive in. One is cybersecurity, we have cloud computing, cloud engineering, CRREM, and digital marketing, so there's 8 of them and what we did is we established a training center to undertake the training of those 8 different activities. We brought in people from the UK to give the training. What we did after that because that's only 50 people that would have been able to train. So what we did is that we discussed with the trainers if they could undertake other training while they were here. So this is an offshoot of that training we did in Belize of 50 persons, which by the way we expanded to 50 more. So right now with that training and the different spinoffs we had including this, we are training over 150 Belizeans in different higher tier services."
Eddison Barrientos, Participant
"For me I see this business as being very lucrative. For one, we are very lacking, what I mean lacking, we have nobody here that's defending us in terms of the internet and Belizeans take it for granted. I have experienced and also many friends have experienced threats not only to our family members but to our relatives and also people who we work with. I used to work with my family and my parents up north and with that we got ransomware on our devices and that caused many problems for them and that opened my eyes to try and do something for this because Belize is lacking and we are very vulnerable in this time."
