This eight-week CyberLeadership program from the CyberLeadership Institute guides experienced security professionals to operate at executive level, ending with a practical board‑facing capstone project that simulates the presentation of a 2-year plan by an incoming CISO to the board. Each week focuses on a distinct leadership domain, and includes practical action items and templates to be incorporated into the capstone. The course offers 40 CPE towards renewing my CISSP.
Week 1 — The role of a CISO
Week 1 orients participants to the program and the cyber resilience mindset, and introduces the CISO role through lived experience and practical lessons. Participants explore the many variants of the CISO position, clarify their ideal role, and begin building a personal brand and interview readiness. The week covers essential first‑100‑day priorities, ways to engage the C‑suite, and personal resilience practices.
Week 2 — Developing a high‑value cyber resilience strategy
Week 2 teaches how to craft a concise, business‑aligned cyber resilience strategy that senior leaders can support. The focus is on defining outcome‑driven objectives, translating business priorities into resilience initiatives, and prioritizing what delivers measurable value.
Week 3 — Leading an enterprise‑wide cyber risk‑aware culture
Week 3 covers the levers required to change behavior at scale: leadership behaviors, communications, incentives, and measurement. As a CISO, education and training are key parts of the role, both up and down the hierarchy. Leaders will need your subject-matter expertise to bring both problems and solutions to them, while the organization as a whole will need consistent training and education. Using programs with measurable metrics is vital to operating at scale and understanding the most significant cultural gaps.
Week 4 — Building and leading a world‑class cyber function
Week 4 focuses on operating models, capability mapping, talent strategy, and scaling operational capability. The sessions guide participants through capability gap analyses, hiring and onboarding plans for critical roles, and decisions about build vs buy vs partner.
Week 5 — Stakeholder management
Week 5 equips leaders to influence internal and external stakeholders with clear business framing, negotiation tactics, and storytelling for boards.
Week 6 — Embedding agile cyber governance
Week 6 shows how to implement governance that is both rigorous and adaptive, covering cross‑functional governance committees, board cyber reporting, active risk profiles, assurance programs, and supply‑chain governance. The week emphasizes practical artifacts: Terms of Reference for governance bodies, board metric sets, and approaches to simulate plausible breach scenarios.
Week 7 — Maintaining resilience & operational excellence
Week 7 focuses on sustaining resilience during constant change by tracking and monitoring, running exercises, and adapting strategies for emerging threats. The weekly collaboration call includes a live cyberbreach exercise for the participants, run by the instructor.
Week 8 — Maximizing your impact and influence as a leader
Week 8 consolidates leadership skills, introduces the Cyber Leadership Framework, and prepares participants to present their capstone projects. Topics include psychological safety, operating strategy for the cyber function, executive coaching, and continuous professional development. The week culminates with final capstone presentations, peer feedback, and a personal development plan.
Capstone project
The capstone is a practical, board‑facing deliverable showing a participant’s ability to convert business context into an actionable cyber resilience outcome. Participants prepare a 10-page briefing deck and a 2 page summary paper, then record their presentation of the briefing deck for evaluation.
Conclusion
The Cyberleadership Program is intended for participants with an interest in the business and management side of cybersecurity, focusing on the CISO role and interactions with board-level leadership. It provides tools (examples, templates, etc) for presentations, and a practical exercise in developing and delivering them. The content can help someone with experience in a cybersecurity management role step up a level or two, and to a lesser extent, provide an introduction to that role for individual contributors considering their next steps. That said, it is not a complete answer for either. The course is best viewed as an opportunity to dip a toe into leadership, or polish existing skills, not as a source of foundational knowledge.
I would recommend this program for those who are ready to make a concerted effort to obtain a CISO (or similar) role, or seeking to switch from the technical side to the business side in the near future.
