In mere three years of its existence, the center has grown remarkably. It employs 15 specialists, it is officially registered at the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation, and it provides training courses for specialists in IT and IT-related fields.
Almost immediately after the opening, the center faced difficulties because of the pandemic, and the goals of the project had to be adapted and adjusted to the realities of the time. It was decided to focus on providing distance learning in cyber security, and it worked.
“At the moment, our center is the only one in Switzerland that provides online cyber security training,” the center’s founder Samir Aliyev says proudly.
However, this success did not come easy, it took years of effort.
According to Samir Aliyev, he was born to a simple family in Shamkir District of Azerbaijan in 1985. He lived there until the age of 16, until his secondary school graduation. Great ambitions, the drive to develop and achieve great goals brought him first to Baku, where he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Law, then to Ankara, where he obtained his Master’s in Law.
Unable to find an opportunity to bring his ideas to life at home, Samir decided to try his luck in Europe in 2016, at the age of 31—and succeeded. He signed up for a German language course in Zurich, got into and graduated from the University of Zurich, adding another degree to his list of achievements, and stayed in the country.
Realizing that the competition in the labor market in the field of law is extremely high, the young man decided that he needed to add more skills and knowledge to his professional background to gain an advantage over competitors.
Samir chose cyber security, that is, protection against threats in the virtual space, since he considers digitalization to be a trend of the future. This decision led him to Harvard University, where he completed a special training course and became a certified specialist in the field of cyber threat protection.
Today, Samir Aliyev successfully runs the Swiss Cyber Institute, and also leads two leadership training programs in the field of cyber security at the University of St. Gallen, where he teaches Swiss lawyers.
He believes that his brainchild, the cyber security training center, owes its successful growth over a relatively short period of time to a pragmatic approach. According to him, knowledge provided here is not theoretical but practical, which guarantees graduates of the center successful application of this knowledge in their daily work.
Samir Aliyev is proud to have won the trust of the world’s leading companies represented in Switzerland, who confidently send their employees to training at the Swiss Cyber Institute. The organization has also established cooperation with Swiss government agencies.
“Global giants such as Google, Huawei, FIFA, Credit Swiss, UBS send their students to us, and the two most prestigious universities in Zurich send their employees to us too,” he says.
Samir Aliyev plans to bring the number of employees of his center to 20 by 2022, to expand its activities within Europe starting from next year, and to bring the number of graduates to 10,000 over the next five years.
Yelena Ostapenko
Translated from 1news.az
Aze.Media
