Padlock

We disrupt the gig economy and create a pathway to employment through leveraging the cybersecurity skills gap and the emphasizing the market's unique characteristics as a career one can enter without a degree.

Our vision is to be a bridge to future of work and harness diverse talent that we know is hidden in plain sight.

We source single parents, specifically mothers, for whom flexible working isn't a lifestyle choice but a requirement. We provide free training in perpetuity to single parents, creating an ever more expert and valuable workforce while addressing the ever-changing cyber threat environment, which already requires constant learning and training.

In 2019 only 10% of the Cyber Security workforce are women in a market that requires diversity of thought and problem solving. 

Yet, for every 100 cybersecurity jobs posted on Indeed.com there are only 32 applicants, that is a huge skills gap and yet the industry is largely ignoring half of the population. 

There are 2m single parents in the UK. 90% are women. And 47% of the children in single parent families live in poverty.

We understand that lone parents face major barriers to enter or re-enter and remain in employment. 

The cybersecurity consulting market is worth $30b/a worldwide. And this booming market provides precisely the lucrative and flexible work that single parents need.

And single parents can provide the market with a source of hidden talent to close the massive cyber skills gap today.

We want to see a world where we go from 10% of women in the cyber workforce to 51%. 

We will create a bridge to the future of employment through a model of FREE, interactive and market-focused cybersecurity training in perpetuity for single parents. 

Single parents face major barriers to enter, or re-enter and remain in employment.

Local childcare is often unaffordable and inflexible and the lack of flexible work makes it hard to combine work and parenting.

A lack of confidence can also hold single parents back from re/entering work.

Once in work, single parents face a significant risk of in-work poverty and can struggle to progress. They're more likely than the average worker to enter/get stuck in low-paid work. Insecure work also means some cycle between low pay and no pay.

Although the UK is enjoying record employment including 68 per cent of single parents in work.

However, single parent employment drops when children are young and childcare costs are highest: in 2015, just 45 per cent of single parents with pre-school children were in work.

68 per cent of single parents enter the three lowest paid occupation groups

In 2014, 72.2 per cent of single parents were out of work were looking after children, studying or sick or disabled.

And increasingly "Women's jobs are disappearing," https://www.theguardian.com/li...

Single parents are too easily left behind due to care responsibilities and employment inflexibility. 

Padlock is a project of the Integrate Agency CIC and we were selected as one of only 7 companies across the UK to address the cyber skills gap https://www.gov.uk/government/...

Our iniative trained London based single parents, many of whom were new to cybersecurity but many of whom were also holding degrees in computer science and cybersecurity yet faced very practical barriers to employment. This work validated our approach to sourcing talent from amongst the 2m UK population of single parents and our trainees are 90% women and 85% black, exactly the opposite of the cybersecurity workforce. 

Since August 2018, we were selected to prestigious cybersecurity accelerators HutZero and Cyber 101 and named a finalist for the 2019 Vodafone Techstarter Awards https://www.telegraph.co.uk/bu... . We have established BETA customers for Padlock and in April we were named one of the UK's 14 Most Innovative Cyber Security Start-up 2019.

Our current position was described by our CEO in an April interview with CyberExchange https://cyberexchange.uk.net/#/news/995.

Our solution is to provide cybersecurity expertise on demand to fill cybersecurity skills gaps through a frictionless platform matching business to cybersecurity freelancers, powered by training, retraining and supporting single parents.

We scale through our iterative, ongoing and always free training. There are 2m UK single parents. 1 in 4 families is led by a single parent. 

We are able to reach and develop this talent pool through person-focussed, curated online training by leading experts, a proactive curation of relevant MOOCs, shared learning resources, and peer-to-peer learning.

Very simply, cybersecurity workforce diversity is a competitive advantage in a market that urgently requires a diversity of thought and problem solving.

In the market there are platforms such as WIseCrowd and Upwork that also provide flexible working but our key competitive advantage is a profound curation of freelance consultancy, because we know them! We have trained them. Supported them. And we have vetted and assured their quality and knowledge.

We were finalists for the Vodafone Techstarters competition for our innovation including using a digital platform to aggregate learning from MOOCs from around the world linked to meet market need for cyber expertise currently using a closed, dedicated Facebook group to curate and share. 

What sets us apart... we offer in-house vetting and ongoing assessment of our talent pool to maximise quality and iterative update in a fast moving and dynamic cyber threat environment. 

We are positioned as the skills gap solution.

Cyber Lambeth is a closed Facebook Group allowing us to share resources, curate cyber MOOCs and create a peer-to-peer learning space online where trainees can share ideas and learning. 

We realised that through an online platform we could also be more accessible with our training to allow for learners to take part and interact remotely through video streaming, broadcasting live and exclusively to our closed Group.

Using our learning from the Cyber Lambeth Facebook Group we are developing a high quality training platform to impact a hugely larger amount of learners and support a new means of flexible learning specific to the needs of single parents.

The learning platform will be a formal version of the closed Cyber Lambeth Facebook page and allow us the ability to curate for learners based on their areas of interest and previous learning. Learners will be able to access the platform from any device. 

This online learning will offer (1) worker-led training and learning in complement to our current class-based training and (2) a curated resource that is nimble and agile to match the dynamic and rapidly changing market needs of cybersecurity.

To date we have trained over 150 single parents in Lambeth (mostly Brixton). This pathway is currently closed for application until we have completed partnership(s) development with the likes of Raytheon UK, EY and others as we want our training to be work and opportunity-led. 

29 have fully completed our free entry level cybersecurity course over four cohorts since December 2018.

3 from the first cohort have been given been further formal training that we have directly funded. They are studying Comptia Security + and expect to complete their exams shortly. 

60% of the December cohort have had paid cybersecurity work, some from our BETA customers (for example the CyberFish Company) and others through organic and direct application.

We are developing employment routes into Symantec, Federation of Small Business and others for our trainees.

More generally our trainees have secured 20 jobs since December 2018, 90% of which are entry level cybersecurity jobs.

Here is a story from one trainee in our first cohort https://www.linkedin.com/pulse...

We have improved the marketability of our trainees and provided a practical route to progression for their new careers.

We are particularly interested in our rate of trainee acquisition and progression. We want to know that we are effective in reaching single parents and also in that they maintain engagement in our training and support.

In the next year we want to (1) gain a big customer such as Raytheon UK, or EY and (2) launch our platform formally to match business to cybersecurity expertise, on demand and (3) build out our learning platform to provide an innovative, curated immersive learning lab of cybersecurity training.

The external risks include an inability of sourcing hidden talent from the community of single parents. Another challenge is keeping our community vibrant, engaged and working to avoid the risk of cohort stagnation and interest drift.

For obvious reasons, cybersecurity business is based on quality and trust and our model is to match new talent with seasoned experts for quality assurance, ongoing training and mentoring purposes. Because trust is a vital concern for business, we are keen not to portray philanthropy in our branding (Padlock) and our emphasis is on the competence and the quality of the service provision/people. 
We create the most impact by creating the most work opportunities possible for our trainees through customer acquisition and a reputation based on competence, professionalism and quality service. 

To mitigate these barriers, we have partnered with Gingerbread, the national single parents charity who engage 800k of the 2m UK lone parents each year. We have also developed social media approaches that leverage single parents networks to source talent, which have proven very successful for us. Additionally, we maintain Cyber Lambeth and closed Facebook Group where we share training, ideas, learning, jobs and news. We are work led, and do not train more than we can reasonably support and develop towards employment. Finally, we mitigate the risk of barriers to trust by brand and reputational management based on quality, professionalism, and strong testimonials for customers.

Social enterprise

Eoin and Kevin founded the company having previously worked together with different companies in leading large-scale government contracts where they managed the data protection/cybersecurity risks across a complicated supply-chain. 

Having developed talent for these contracts, we have taken an apprentice with no tech background to a £79,000/a($100,000 USD) cybersecurity salary in 36 months

Laura Bassett, has a background in Business Development, Partnership Development and Co-created Service Design within charities including specifically the women's sector. 'My interest in cybersecurity comes from a fundamental interest in people.

Padlock is an initiative of the Integrate Agency, we are based in London UK and operate in London. We have ambitions to grow across the UK, into Europe and into North America. 

We are uniquely positioned in our industry as we are applying a social enterprise approach to creating impact by leveraging a scarcity of talent to create opportunities for single parents.

At the beginning of each training programme, we tell our cohorts that cyber success requires courage, commitment and curiosity, to conquer the assumption that one needs a cybersecurity degree or technical background to enter the workforce, which is not true.

Through a strong, trusted background in social entrepreneurship and a network that includes national charities, we are able to source hidden talent where the cybersecurity market has previously been unable to make progress in both the gender and ethnicity diversity gaps. 

And our model works. We have sourced successful employment for our trainees and they continue to develop their expertise. 

We also have the firm support of UK government and the cybersecurity market including a variety of awards and practical in kind support. Our model of recycling profit and leveraging lucrative work to create an iterative model for constant/ongoing training has captured the imagination and is complimentary to a dynamic and ever changing threat environment. 

We are also a great team. Our key characteristics are our enthusiastic approach to work and our commitment to helping people.

Finalists for the 2019 Vodafone Techstarter competition https://www.telegraph.co.uk/bu...

We were selected to cybersecurity specific pre-accelerators HutZero #4 and Cyber 101 (2019). 

We were selected as one of seven UK firms to tackle the cyber skills gap by the UK government Cyber Skills Immediate Impact Fund https://www.gov.uk/government/...

Our CEO was named in the 2019 UBS Social Entrepreneur Index as 'One to Watch' https://www.socialentsindex.co...

Named one of the 14 Most Innovative UK Cybersecurity SMEs at Pitchfest 2019 (2019)

Selected for the DCMS cybersecurity Pitchfest (2019)

Selected for the DCMS Innovation Zone for CYBERUK (2019)

Selected for the Strategy Insight Lab (2019)

Selected Innovation Stand Infosecurity Conference (Europe 2019)

We are a social enterprise with a robust business model that leverages a scarcity of human resource in cybersecurity to access high paying and dynamic work for single parents. 

Our model is a 20% fee across all transactions where the competition charge 10%. Unlike WiseCrowd and similar platforms such as UpWork, we curate, train, mentor and quality assure our workers to add value to our services for customers.

Our secret sauce is that we up-cycle our profit into training provision for our learners, catalysing their growing expertise and creating a virtuous cycle whereby the more expert and valuable our learners become.... the more lucrative their work... and the more investment there is to be invested into more of their training. 

We have secured grants but have developed BETA customers to test our assumptions. Our scale will be through business growth and trading rather than grants.

Cybersecurity is largely standard around the world bar regional regulatory approaches. We believe we can scale our work into the USA and Canada and are exhibiting at Collision 2019 in Toronto to explore entry into the North American market. 

Were we named as a Solver, the biggest impact would be for our trainees. Padlock could leverage the recognition into PR and work opportunities. As well, the sense of achievement for our trainees would be great acknowledgement for their hard work and commitment 

We would invest the prize money into an immersive cybersecurity training lab for our trainees.