Skip to main content
Skillrung

Local government, elected officials and institutions

Digital skills courses for mayors: securing the town hall, its acts and its residents

In brief

A town hall holds the civil register, the electoral roll, and the school and welfare records of its residents, and it has to stay open whatever happens. Yet a municipality with fewer than ten staff has neither an IT department nor a security officer. Skillrung courses for elected officials start from that reality: what the mayor decides, what they demand of their contractors, what they must be able to do themselves.

Updated on Reviewed by Skillrung teamReview by a subject-matter expert under way

Start with the free slidesThe subscription: €29.99/month incl. VAT

Recommended courses

What we recommend to mayors

The first four slides of every course are free, with no account and no bank card. From the fifth onwards, a subscription is required.

The mayor decides, even when they think they are not deciding

The local authority is the controller of the data it holds: it is the executive that answers for it, not the IT contractor. That covers the civil register, school enrolments, the municipal social welfare centre, video surveillance and the electoral files. Delegating the technical running of a system is normal; delegating the responsibility for it is not. The courses turn that responsibility into concrete, verifiable decisions: what has to appear in a public procurement contract for IT services, what proof of backup and of successful restoration a contractor must supply, who to alert in the event of an incident, in what order, and within what deadline.

A paralysed town hall is a public service that has stopped

Ransomware in a municipality does not show up as a line in a set of accounts: the civil register issues no more certificates, the school canteen stops invoicing, payroll halts, and official acts no longer reach the prefecture — the French State's representative in the department — through electronic filing. Going back to paper lasts weeks. The habits that head off that situation are not technical: a backup kept offline and restored once to prove it works, named accounts for every member of staff, stronger authentication on remote access, and a one-page recovery plan posted somewhere other than the server that will be encrypted.

An elected official is a target for impersonation and manipulation

An elected official is a particular target: their identity is public, their word commits the municipality, and a false statement travels faster than a denial. Fabricated audio and video have left the world of technical demonstrations and become a tool for fraud and for local destabilisation. The advanced phishing course deals explicitly with three local scenarios: bank transfer fraud presented as a request from the mayor, the takeover of an official social media account, and the verification of an urgent request supposedly coming from the head of council administration. The habit taught is always the same: call back through a channel different from the one carrying the request.

Artificial intelligence in the municipality

Minutes of council meetings, replies to residents, briefing notes, draft resolutions: the uses are immediate and the gains real. So are the limits. A generated administrative text commits the municipality; residents' data has no place in a freely accessible service; and being transparent about the use of these tools is itself a local political question. The “Generative AI” course gives a three-pass proofreading method and a grid of what may and may not be entrusted to a freely accessible tool, applied to the minutes of a council meeting and to a reply sent to a resident.

Sources

What the official text says

Every figure or legal statement on this page points to its primary source, with its date. We publish no figure without a verifiable source.

  • The NIS2 Directive requires the members of the management bodies of the entities concerned to follow training in cybersecurity (Article 20(2)).

    Source : Directive (UE) 2022/2555 (NIS2), article 20 : Journal officiel de l'Union européenne, 14 décembre 2022.

  • Designating a data protection officer is compulsory where the processing is carried out by a public authority or a public body (Article 37 of the GDPR).

    Source : Règlement (UE) 2016/679 (RGPD), article 37 : Journal officiel de l'Union européenne, 27 avril 2016.

Frequently asked questions

What mayors ask us

Is a small municipality really a target?

Attacks are massive and automatic: they do not pick the municipality, they find an open door. The smallest municipalities are in fact the more vulnerable, because they concentrate every service on two or three computers administered remotely by a contractor, with nobody on site whose job it is to notice.

What is the mayor personally responsible for?

The municipality is the controller within the meaning of the GDPR, and the executive answers for it. That does not create automatic criminal liability in the event of an attack, but it does impose documented obligations: a record of processing activities, information given to individuals, notification of breaches, and security matched to the risk.

Do we have to appoint a data protection officer?

The appointment is compulsory for public authorities and public bodies, whatever their size. It can be shared across a group of municipalities or a joint authority, which is what most small municipalities do, in order to share both the cost of the post and the legal expertise the post calls for.

Can council staff take the same courses?

Yes. The catalogue covers the town clerk, the local government officer, the chief executive of council services and the municipal police officer: each of them finds their own tools and the people they deal with in the examples, with the same core course and the same levelled quizzes.

Free or paid

What you can read without paying

The rule is the same for every job, for an anonymous visitor as for a free account.

No payment, no account

What is free

  • The first four slides of every course, with no account
  • The Beginner level quiz of every course, with your score
  • The standalone free quizzes and all the guides
  • Course pages, job pages and topic pages

Creating an account unlocks no extra slide. A free account is there to keep your progress, your job and your quiz results.

With the subscription

What is paid for

  • Every published course, at no extra cost
  • Examples and scenarios adapted to your job
  • Section quizzes, without limit
  • The three levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Expert
  • A named, verifiable certificate of achievement, valid for 12 months
  • The daily revision, so you do not forget what you have learned
  • Your progress, your XP, your badges and your day streak

The first four slides of every course are free, with no account and no bank card. From the fifth onwards, a subscription is required.

Not mayor?

This page covers one specific job. Pick yours: the course examples become your own. Nothing is saved until you confirm.

Nothing is saved until you confirm. You can change your choice at any time.

Kept for 180 days in a preference cookie, set only when you confirm. It adapts the examples and unlocks no content.

Already told us your job elsewhere on the site? This page always shows the one in its address: see the courses for my job.

Neighbouring jobs

The other jobs in the “Local government, elected officials and institutions” family, with the same courses and personalisation of their own.

Keep going on Skillrung

The pages that follow on from this one, in the recommended order.