I am actually sick of the attempts to cash-in the needs of professionals that want to get a proper DPO qualification, by proposing useless “seminars” or “masters” or “crash courses” that promise to turn people that never approached the data protection issues before into skilled DPOs. This is exploitation, like promising that in fifteen days you can be turned from a desk geek into somebody able to beat Mike Tyson in his primes.
Becoming a decent DPO means to be knowledgeable, at least, in:
- operating system installation and configuration,
- network design,
- users management,
- software analysis and programming,
- database design,
- data analysis,
- IT security,
- digital forensics,
- incident management,
- corporate management,
- marketing and advertising process,
- manufacturing/service design processes,
- manufacturing/service delivery processes,
- criminal, contract and labour law,
- EU law (yes, as much as it comes a surprise, GDPR isn’t the only regulation you need to know),
- crisis management and public relations,
Becoming just slightly proficient in any of this topics requires months of full dedication, so try yourself to do the calculation and see how long do you need to practice before acquiring a proper set of skills.
And if you actually think you can learn all that during a week-end intensive seminar, good luck.
To those who hire you.