• The company will offer training and internships to students of the first official degree in Cybersecurity in Catalonia.

 

• The collaboration is designed to enable ENTI-UB students to specialise in a sector that, in this autonomous region alone, requires 10,000 new experts.

 

• SIA, which has agreements with 26 universities and 23 vocational training centres, adds the training cycle of the Barcelona centre in the process of expansion in Catalonia.

 

Madrid, 20 February 2025.- Roberto Espina, CEO of SIA, the Indra Group company specialising in cybersecurity, has signed an agreement with Jan Rosés, Executive Director of ENTI - University of Barcelona (ENTI-UB), to collaborate in the practical training of students of the first official degree in Cybersecurity in Catalonia.

 

ENTI-UB, a private higher technological education centre attached to the University of Barcelona, launched this training cycle at the beginning of the 2024-2025 academic year. Its aim is to strengthen specialisation in the field of ICT and, in this specific case, Information Security, in order to respond to the high demand for professionals in a growing sector; according to recent data from Incibe, Spain needs some 99,000 cybersecurity experts to deal with the cyberthreats of an increasingly connected world.

 

The agreement is materialised in the development of external academic internships at SIA through a training project per student. Thus, students of the ENTI-UB degree in Cybersecurity, in their first contact with a digitised labour market, will learn about the methods, tools and strategies used in the protection of all types of organisations. The initiative also contemplates the extension of the collaboration in the future with actions such as classes, lectures and other types of training activities by the Indra Group company.

 

During the signing of this collaboration agreement, held yesterday afternoon at the Conciliar Seminary in Barcelona, where ENTI-UB has the classrooms for cybersecurity studies and the laboratory, the CEO of SIA stated that, ‘to be a cybersecurity professional in our country, you need extra specialisation outside of formal training and constant updating. Like other booming and developing technological fields, such as AI, Big Data or 5G, the cybersecurity sector continues and will continue to grow’. ‘Given the forecasts’, explained Roberto Espina, ’at SIA, we invest in promoting the attraction and training of professionals with different levels of experience. We firmly believe that it is essential to do so in order to meet the needs of the market and enable a secure digital transformation of organisations.

 

High demand for specialists in Catalonia

 

The cybersecurity sector in Catalonia grew by 16% compared to the previous year, the highest figure in the historical series, according to the report La ciberseguretat en Catalunya that the Agència de Ciberseguretat de Catalunya and the agency Acció presented last year.

 

The study also reveals that this autonomous region is the third region in the EU that attracted the most foreign investment projects in 2023. In total, it attracted more than 66 million euros and enabled the creation of 400 new jobs.

 

SIA, which has more than 2,000 experts and is the largest Spanish company specialising in cybersecurity, is in the process of expanding in Catalonia, reinforcing its response to the cybersecurity demands of companies in the region and its commitment to local talent for its growth. As a result of this agreement, it is preparing to offer its first work experience to ENTI-UB students, who will be the future professionals of the cybersecurity ecosystem; according to the Agència de Ciberseguretat de Catalunya, more than 10,000 new experts are required to cover all the demand.

 

The Indra Group company has a proven track record in training students in the discipline of cybersecurity. Every year, SIA trains and incorporates around 500 professionals with a well-established model called Cyber-Capacities Talent Camp. In addition, its attraction of talent is supported by agreements with educational centres which, following the signing of the agreement with the University of Barcelona, now number 27 with universities and 23 with vocational training centres; collaborations with entities specialised in cybersecurity for training and certification of personnel; outsourced training; and headhunters, for highly specialised profiles.