BBVA opens up its cybersecurity training content after training 60,000 employees
The bank becomes the first financial institution in the world to share its cybersecurity knowledge with society through Coursera, a learning platform with 97 million registered students. As experts in cybersecurity, BBVA's goal is to train, motivate and empower its customers, and society in general, to acquire secure behaviors to properly manage the risks posed by the digital era.
Cybersecurity has become a basic and highly required skill both in the labor market, as well as at a personal level. The acceleration of the digital transformation has resulted in an increase in the risk exposure area for both individuals and companies, with the emergence of new and increasingly sophisticated threats. The Covid19 pandemic or the war in Ukraine make the need for basic cybersecurity knowledge even more relevant.
At BBVA, security is considered to be not only a strategic priority, but also one of the main components of its digital transformation. Cybersecurity is one of the pillars for carrying out this strategy, and employee training and awareness has been one of the essential components. “With our training model, BBVA Campus, we design learning solutions that address our professionals’ present and future needs. In the last year we have carried out a thorough reskilling and upskilling exercise to equip our employees with the skills that were to mark the bank's strategy in the coming years,” explains Alberto González, Head of Training at BBVA.
Among those skills was cybersecurity, and since then, the bank has trained nearly 60,000 employees worldwide. “We have some of the best experts in cybersecurity and a large part of the workforce has already acquired basic cybersecurity skills. Now we want to go beyond this to take advantage of all of our experience and offer it to a broader public,” he adds.
BBVA wants to share this knowledge and experience on a massive scale and make all this knowledge available to society through a series of training pathways via the international platform Coursera. With this launch open to anyone “we make specific and pioneering cybersecurity content available to everyone, one of the fundamental pillars of our organization is to share knowledge so that we can learn together and create opportunities for everyone”.
As a starting point, anyone can now access a MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) course on Cybersecurity free of charge. This is the first training resource in Spanish of a series of initiatives that will be expanded in the coming months and will offer essential knowledge in cybersecurity as well as content valid for personal defense, crisis management, fundamental notions in security operations, data security, the fight against fraud or information security and data governance.
“Training for employees and society as a whole is a great lever for attracting talent, and we want to make all the opportunities that the bank offers visible and widespread,” says González. The new agreement with Coursera is in addition to BBVA's own programs such as ‘Aprendemos juntos’ (We Learn Together) and the collaborations that the bank has with leading organizations in the training market (LinkedIn Learning, Get Smarter) to offer the best updated training to its employees.