The team at Raytheon Emirates helps young people with Computer Sciences backgrounds get real-world experience to prepare them to make the leap into their future careers.
Raytheon Emirates is a subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies, headquartered in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Raytheon Emirates focuses on cybersecurity and empowering future technology leaders in support of Abu Dhabi’s Economic Vision for 2030. This vision includes fostering a cyber-secure digital transformation of the UAE for economic diversification, growth, and development of a highly-skilled, productive Emirati workforce.
The mission of Raytheon Emirates Cyber is to collaborate with the UAE government, commercial partners, and the education sector and provide them with innovative and robust cybersecurity capabilities.
Raytheon Emirates is passionate about giving back to society, and it’s part of its vision to provide undergraduate students from across the UAE with hands-on cyber learning opportunities. To accomplish this goal, the company provides training that empowers students to learn cutting-edge technical skills through a highly selective and elite internship opportunity. The goal for these interns is to practice cybersecurity skills and build upon the Computer Science theory they have studied throughout their time in colleges and universities. When these students leave Raytheon, they will have learned valuable skills to bring to the job market, solidified their career goals, and developed new technical skills in their internship program.
The central theme of this internship program is the hands-on practice in a cyber range. Raytheon felt that students in the UAE didn’t have frequent access to high-quality cyber ranges and wanted to offer that experience to their internship participants. To address this technology skills gap, the Raytheon team leveraged Project Ares as an educational tool to bring the practical hands-on keyboard learning element into their internship program.
The team at Raytheon choose the Project Ares Digital Forensics scenario as the learning lab and arranged for cybersecurity expert, Michael Kaplan of Phase 2 Advantage , to tutor the students. Mr. Kaplan was able to bring expert insight to their virtual classroom, clarify topics when there were questions and continue to expand upon the lessons contained within Project Ares.
As a result of this intensive Forensics learning experience, the interns found that Project Ares not only tested their skills but also taught them new skills when they used the hints contained within the Forensics course.
The team at Raytheon Emirates feels that having a structured-skills learning program is the heart and soul of an internship program that prepares students to be successful as they transition into their specialized careers.
Many of the student interns are soon to graduate and this internship is usually the final requirement for them to complete their degree programs. However, they often don’t know what to do next or even what jobs might be a good fit. There are countless options, but they’ve had limited exposure to the professional working landscape.
Fatma and her team encourage them to reflect on some challenging questions during the internship program:
Would you fit better into Digital Forensics or Security Analytics ?
Do you prefer government work or penetration testing?
The program leaders are always eager to give their interns more insight into what these career fields hold in store for their futures. They bring in experts from various disciplines and backgrounds to offer their real-world insights into their fields of expertise as well as discuss areas of opportunity for new graduates to find roles that interest them. They firmly believe that the experience of learning from technology experts coupled with the real hands on the keyboard experience that the interns get from Project Ares is helping students find where they fit into the professional world.
This Success Story was Interviewed & Written By Laurie Webb-DesJardins and Giuseppe Scalamogna
