With support from the UAE Cybersecurity Council, Microsoft and CPX, a G42 company, have launched the second edition of its program to train and employ young Emirati women into the cyberspace.
Called ‘She Protects’, the initiative is designed to prepare Emirati women, who are recent university graduates, to find jobs in cybersecurity fields.
“Cybersecurity is a very male-oriented field,” CPX’s CEO, Hadi Anwar, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Gisec Global 2026 exhibition. “We want to do things to help change that narrative.”
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Anwar said that some of the women who underwent the program have since been employed at big tech companies, like Microsoft.
The first edition of the program was launched earlier this year, which graduated 50 women in June 2026 following a six-month curriculum. The second cohort will target three times as many women, with 150 women joining from universities across the UAE.
Applications for the program will open later this month, with the program running from November 2026 until April 2027.
Anwar explained that the women partaking in this cohort will get hands-on training by cybersecurity experts. “The plan was to make sure that it is not just a fluffy kind of instructor-led online training,” he said.
Participants in the second cohort will undertake Microsoft’s SC-900 Security, Compliance and Identity Fundamentals certification, comprehensive cyber awareness and CPX’s threat landscape training, as well as immersive simulation-based cyber labs by Cyberbit.
“Cybersecurity is an area where there are ample jobs, but not real experts available in the market,” the CEO of CPX said, adding that it’s a global problem.
Source: Khaleej Times