Ten commandments for effective security training

Skip the boring lectures and understand how people really learn new information and habits

By Joe Ferrara, Wombat Security Technologies

May 03, 2012 — CSO —

Information security people think that simply making users aware of security issues will make them change their behavior. But security pros are learning the hard way that awareness rarely equals change.

One fundamental problem is that most awareness programs are created and run by security professionals, people who were not hired or trained to be educators. These training sessions often consist of long lectures and boring slides—with no thought or research put into what material should be taught and how to teach it. As a result, organizations are not getting their desired results and there's no overall progress.

To solve this puzzle, it's important to step back and understand how people most effectively learn subject matter of any type.


[Also read 7 practical ideas for security awareness | How to change people's minds]


The science of learning dates back to the early 1950s, and its techniques have been proven over time and adopted as accepted learning principles. Applied to information security training, these techniques can provide immediate, tangible, long-term results in educating employees and improving your company's overall security posture.


1. Serve small bites

People learn better when they can focus on small pieces of information that the mind can digest easily. It's unreasonable to cover 55 different topics in 15 minutes of security training and expect someone to remember it all and then change their behavior.

Short bursts of training are always more effective.


2. Reinforce lessons

People learn by repeating elements over time—without frequent feedback and opportunities for practice, even well-learned abilities go away. Security training should be an ongoing event, not a one-off seminar.


3. Train in context

People tend to remember context more than content. In security training, it's important to present lessons in the same context as the one in which the person is most likely to be attacked.


4. Vary the message

Concepts are best learned when they are encountered in many contexts and expressed in different ways. Security training that presents a concept to a user multiple times and in different phrasing makes the trainee more likely to relate it to past experiences and forge new connections.

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