This is the thrust behind one South-east Asian government’s efforts to train and nurture civil servants in coding savvy.
To raise the digital literacy of public sector leaders and officers—policy makers who impact the nation’s infocomm technology (ICT) and ‘smart-nation’ professionals—the government of Singapore has launched The Digital Academy.
D N Prasad, Senior Director of Strategy (People & Organisation), GovTech, spearheads the academy: “The Digital Academy was conceptualized to address several gaps in the learning ecosystem, particularly for tech professionals in public service. Its unique value proposition is the offering of specially-curated programs that will impart both deep technical skills and understanding of the business of government to ICT practitioners in the public sector. This would only be possible by working in close partnership with tech practice leaders in GovTech and reputable subject-matter experts from the industry, such as Secure Code Warrior.”
The firm being referred to—Secure Code Warrior—specializes in secure coding solutions. It is one of the academy’s nine pioneer content partners, and it is the only firm from Australia.
The firm, which is running coding tournaments during the academy’s launch week (21–25 June), will support cybersecurity skills development through a secure code program available to all government agencies and targeted at development teams and application security practitioners. Said its CEO and co-founder Pieter Danhieux: “Code is at the heart of many everyday interactions—from banking to healthcare and transportation—so it’s essential for all organizations to empower development and security teams to not only find vulnerabilities but gain the knowledge and skills to prevent them from occurring in the first place.”
Other content partners include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Trustwave and Tableau: delivering a total of 95 program to be available by end of March 2022. The program menu span fields such as application development, data and analytics, digital leadership, and technology and operations management.
