Offering privacy opportunities to stakeholders and career changers! 

Michael Irene is a data and information governance practitioner based in London, United Kingdom. He is also a Fellow of Higher Education Academy, UK, and can be reached via moshoke@yahoo.com; twitter: @moshoke

There are so many things to cover about 2022 with regards to data privacy. The various fines would have been a nice place to start, but let’s not end this piece of article in those news. I’ve been thinking about the best piece of article to leave this year with and two things came to mind. First, after the Nigerian Data Protection Bureau (NDPB) requested that companies have their Data Privacy Champions, train them and get them into their privacy functions, I will present some characteristics these champions should have (I’ve written about them in previous articles). Second, the world is morphing fast, and it seems to me that there is a moving train filled with career changers and individuals stuck in  areas they might want to change — I will be addressing those individuals here.

I think these two focus points are a good way to end the year (Editor’s Note: This piece was written on 30.12.22). Over the last couple of months I’ve tried to address critical points and tease out weaknesses of certain companies. It’s been a good year in privacy, we witnessed the first Picasso privacy award showcasing the potentials in privacy and, truly, it was remarkable. It shines a light on the advancement and potential privacy space will take in years to come.

It’s also important to remember that the space of privacy software is gaining pace and businesses are tapping into it. The market, according to a recent research, is worth over $5.5 billion with the potential to reach $35 billion in 2025. There are some players in the space already winning and dominating by creating more modules, educational pieces and more integration stack. These are interesting times for software developers interested in protecting the human rights of individuals especially with regards to how they can help companies during their privacy by design approach.

Privacy engineering is another area that is increasingly gaining space and some universities are already offering these courses to students. There’s ample opportunity for universities to start looking for ways to create privacy courses to meet the ever increasing demands of privacy professionals. It will be interesting to see how privacy and academia merge to solve these magnanimous expanding fields. But I digress.

Now that companies are required, especially in Nigeria, to build their privacy teams, have privacy champions, or create the Data Protection Office function, I’ve created a free programme for various company stakeholders on how to structure their privacy teams, train their privacy champions and of course, create information on how they choose the right data protection officer. This training course is online and anyone can access it by sending me an email and we can share the zoom invite for interested participants.

Second, there’s an increase in the demand for privacy professionals. The question is: where are these professionals? The true answer is: there aren’t enough! Can anyone be trained to become a privacy professional? Answer: yes they can be trained and they can use these interesting times to break into any industry of their choice. I’ve created a roadmap for anyone interested in career change and wants to venture in the privacy space. I have created a one hour seminar for individuals willing to join the moving train.

All seminars, both for stakeholders and career change enthusiasts, will be held in January 2023. Interested individuals should send an email to me and indicate what seminar they are interested in attending.

Happy New Year!

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