How To Improve Your Cybersecurity Training

New Cybersecurity Training Methods

October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. With the vast majority of businesses facing a hacking attempt as the result of mistakes by internal personnel, cybersecurity training your employees to be aware of dangerous links, simple passwords, and phishing emails is crucial.

Many employees dread cybersecurity training. It generates boredom and fear, making them resistant to learning the skills necessary to spot risks and avoid unsafe practices to protect the company from an attack.

 

Make It Fun

make it funIt can feel tedious to try and make a training fun for employees, but research shows that these methods might actually help your cybersecurity training message stick with personnel.

To do this, you can use games and contests to make information stick. Whoever wins can get prizes such as gift cards, a coveted parking space, free clothing, and more. These incentives can help teach employees about staying safe online.

Making cybersecurity training fun can also help your trainees feel more at ease with security instructors. Employees tend to feel cornered or fearful with the current methods being used in such trainings, which can prevent them from retaining information. Making traditional training methods more personal and entertaining can make your staff more likely to engage and learn.

Have Employees Lead the Training

employee lead trainingIn order to rethink how you train your employees in cybersecurity, have fellow employees teach the training rather than security professionals.

This not only helps people in the cybersecurity training feel much more relaxed, but it can also make the message very relative coming from a coworker or friend at work rather than a corporate professional.

Here’s how it works—employees who have little to no background in security are trained in cybersecurity, enough so that they can explain it to someone else. These employees can get incentives to help their coworkers learn about cybersecurity through trainings.

This approach to cybersecurity training benefits both sides of the office, as employees feel more comfortable with coworkers and are more likely to learn, and the employee trainers get rewards. Plus, this effective training method can help minimize security risks, resulting in overall benefits for the company.

Use Positive Reinforcement

positive reinforcementRather than chastise employees for doing something wrong—and thus contributing to the apprehension they may already have about security practices at work—try using positive reinforcement to improve your cybersecurity training.

This includes giving your employees chances to practice what they know and then providing feedback. By doing this, you can reinforce behavior that may have sidestepped an attack instead of reprimanding them for making a mistake that many employees can and do make.

Despite the numbers of employees trained in cybersecurity every year, over 90% of cyber attacks come from an email with a dangerous link that an employee has clicked on. Making use of positive reinforcement can not only help your employees cultivate a greater awareness of these attacks, but can motivate them to engage in safer behaviors while at the office.

Training your employees on cybersecurity best practices is an absolute must for businesses of all shapes and sizes, but unfortunately, these trainings often fail to be effective enough to prevent attacks.

To help improve your cybersecurity training, take a different approach. Use incentives to help employees learn and engage. Enlist a few employees to conduct the training. And finally, use positive reinforcement to make the message stick.

You can make cybersecurity best practices just another day at the office for your employees. Scale back your risk for attacks with these tips!