Hands-On Training Makes Developers Get Addicted to Secure Coding

Have you ever heard of an astronaut who goes into space without getting training for a certain period in simulators or testing their skills in the Virtual Reality Laboratory before their first mission?

Or a ship’s captain who sails by only reading a ship handling guide?

Or a doctor who operates after merely reading about it from the books?

No?astronaut,?captain?or?doctor?can develop professional competence by memorizing theory, reading textbooks?or going through classroom training.?You’ve all probably seen many examples of this in your life, and you can add many more examples from your personal experiences. Practice is significant to truly internalize what you learn from textbooks. You need to receive hands-on training through the real challenges faced; thus, dealing with the next more comfortably: what could happen and what to do if an astronaut’s spacesuit is damaged while on a spacewalk; how to sail safely if a storm is approaching; how to prevent medical errors if a complication develops during surgery, etc. They cannot learn all these things from books. Instead, they need hands-on experience to cope with real-world challenges.

The same goes for?software developers who are learning secure coding. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that they only learn what it is by definition with theoretical learning. They need?hands-on experience?to master their secure coding skills—from finding the most common security vulnerabilities to preventing them.?Hands-on training gives them the opportunity to experience real-world situations.

Practice Makes Perfect

A one-size-fits-all approach to learning doesn’t work anymore. The trend is hands-on learning nowadays. It is also known as experiential learning—Learning things by doing or experiencing. A mechanic can understand the nuances of an engine not just through his/her eyes and ears but also with actual hands-on training. Hands-on training gives learners self-correct opportunity. When people are allowed to roll up their sleeves and experience the subject matter in a simulation, rather than reading long passages of text or simply watching dull slide shows, they tend to learn and retain information better.

We highly recommend hands-on training for developers that wants to improve their secure coding skills. So, developers find a chance to practice what they learn from videos or textbooks. It is not practical to only use videos or slides for developer training as these methods aren’t engaging. Moreover, developers who tend to be creative do not enjoy taking such toneless training. They want to be the ones who want to use tools, solve problems and write code rather than sitting bored and being lectured for long hours. They enjoy finding and fixing vulnerabilities as they code in real-time through hands-on training.?

Cyber Challenge Delivers Hands-On Secure Coding Training for Developers

As the threat landscape is expanding, secure coding practices become mandatory for an organization in addition to other security best practices. This requires developers to come to the stage. And, this requires hands-on practice, leaving old-school classroom practices behind.

Cyber Challenge is a secure coding training platform that provides organizations with hands-on training and a user-friendly platform to build a secure coding culture easily and in a fun way among their development team. Cyber Challenge is a place where developers get addicted to secure coding because it turns secure coding learning experience into an engaging and interactive one with a developer-friendly approach. It is more than a check-the-box training platform. It helps organizations raise the application security bar across their development team in a fast and scalable manner. There are three modules on the platform?—?Animated Training Videos, Gamified Challenges and Interactive Hacking Stories.?Each module is constantly expanding and updated based on your company's needs and?goes?beyond simple tutorials by offering job-relevant learning experience to development teams.?Furthermore, using gamified elements on the platform helps increase the willingness of developers to learn secure coding in a more enjoyable and interactive way. Developers don’t learn how to secure code from not just the books but learn by doing and experiencing as an astronaut, a doctor, and a captain do in their profession.?

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