Tip of the Week: How to Engage Your Team in Security Training

When it comes to your business’ security, your team members can either be your greatest vulnerability or your greatest strength. In order to ensure that the latter is the case, you need to make sure that they are all trained up in the proper security measures. For your convenience, we wanted to share a few tips to help make this training more effective.

Keep It Interesting

If you’ve seen the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, you’ll know what I mean when I say that his economics teacher’s approach to teaching could very well be seen as justification for someone playing hooky. Likewise, if your training is boring and repetitive, your team members will likely be about as engaged as the economics class was while Ben Stein droned through his lecture in monotone.

By switching up your approach to training, particularly in its focus and its format, you can help to keep your team receptive to the instructions you provide. There are other advantages that incorporating variety into your training can provide, as different people tend to have different methods of learning most effectively. Using different tools and approaches ensures that you touch on these different methods while also helping to keep your team members from mentally checking out.

This Time, It’s Personal

As much as we talk about how a team needs to work as one unit, the reality is that different employees, fulfilling different roles and beholden to different responsibilities, will (cue surprise) have different concerns and priorities. Because of this, any kind of “one-size-fits-all” messaging in regards to workplace cybersecurity will only ever be so effective.

Consider each employee’s role in your organization, and adjust their training to match the threats that they will need to deal with most frequently. By prioritizing your training to match the realistic threats that your team members will need to deal with, you can make the most of the time you have available to train them.

Short and Sweet

When was the last time you looked forward to any kind of mandated training—particularly that which seemed to drag on and on? As much as you’d think that your team members would relish the opportunity to spend an afternoon not working, most of them probably won’t find the prospect of sitting in a training session the whole time to be ideal, either.

Do your best to condense the lesson you want your training to impart to the simplest takeaways that you can, giving your team actionable instructions to follow. It also doesn’t hurt to branch out in the format of your training as well, to both keep your team on their toes and to help give them as well-rounded an experience as possible.

At Advantage IT Management, our team is here to assist anyone seeking to improve their cybersecurity, providing the resources to businesses that choose to work with us. Find out if you would be a good match for our services by calling 251-662-9770 today.