ROC Mondriaan Launches First MBO ‘Secure Programming’ course

The School for ICT of ROC Mondriaan are the first MBO (Intermediate Vocational Education) institution in The Netherlands to offer the elective course ‘Secure Programming'. On Wednesday 17 May the elective was introduced during an official kick off. ROC Mondriaan organised a knowledge intensive programme which was attended by both students, teachers and anyone interested in the subject.

This elective teaches ICT students at the MBO the whole process of developing secure software. The demand of cyber security specialists has never been this high. During the development of this elective, specialists from the business community were involved who are facing new threats on a daily basis. Vincent Raphael, projectleader P@CT, says “Applications should not have vulnerabilities in their basic infrastructure. Right now the focus in the development of applications is more on useability. Firewalls and virusscanner are fine, but the very base should be built secure too.”

For this elective ROC Mondriaan works together closely with organisations such as Exact and HSD partner Siemens. As a result the students are being taught the latest insights and educated adequately for todays challenges. ‘Secure Programming’ is one of the outcomes of P@CT which is focused on expanding MBO cyber security educational offerings.

P@CT is part of the infrastructure of HSD. The Cyber Security Academy and the Centre of Expertise Cyber Security of The Hague University of Applied Sciences are rather focused on higher education, whereas P@CT focusses on MBO. The objective is to realise a good connection of MBO cyber security education to the labour market and to realise a smooth learning career trajectory between MBO with HBO and university.

Click here to read the article in Dutch.