What Makes a Security Awareness Training Program Actually Work?

Security awareness training sounds valuable on paper. But in a lot of cases, it doesn't do a great deal for helping businesses improve their overall security posture. If employees are unengaged or demotivated, a lot of this training goes out of the window as soon as an employee closes the browser tab. 

They simply rush through the material so they can click the “complete” button and head back to work. But the problem is that cyberthreats are relentless, and if your employees fail to apply the learnings from the training program, your business is just as exposed as it was beforehand. 

Whether it’s a fake invoice that slips by the finance team or a spoofed request from someone’s manager to send confidential details, human error is still the root cause of 95% of breaches. This can be doubly frustrating for business owners who invest major time, energy, and resources into training that’s meant to prevent exactly these moments.

So what makes a security training program truly reduce risk? Let’s find out.

It Starts With Relevance, Not Rules

If you want to drive engagement and actually see real returns from your security awareness training program, you need to focus on making it targeted and relevant. 

There’s no sugarcoating that many employees see these mandatory trainings as a chore. Then, as soon as they sit down to complete the task and they’re greeted with generic content or material that’s completely disconnected from their day to day job, they’re highly likely to disengage.

Someone who works in product development isn’t going to be intrigued by retail POS scams. Because of this, training works a lot better when it’s tailored to real-life situations that employees face each day. For a finance team, this could be spotting fake financial fraud scenarios, not just random screenshots of unrelated phishing attempts. 

It’s also helpful to use real-life examples, preferably from the same industry you work in. This helps to train people to spot real danger faster, because it will feel familiar. It’s all about building up pattern recognition, but this only works when the training situations you present feel genuine and relatable. 

Short, Frequent Training Beats Long, Yearly Sessions

Many businesses take on security training on an annual basis. While this may be enough to hit some compliance obligations, it’s usually not enough to have any real impact on your security. One long annual session is easy to forget. 

In general, it’s better to use short, more frequent training sessions throughout the year. This could be five to ten minutes once per month, a half an hour session each quarter, or best of all, a few short minutes several times spread throughout the week. These smaller sessions fit much easier into busy schedules and don't get in the way of productivity.

At the same time, this frequent exposure really helps to reinforce the training material and to keep security top of mind for your employees. But remember, doing more repetitions is only going to have an impact when you make the programs relevant and fresh each time. If you’re just reusing the same content four times per year, it’s unlikely to provide much value. 

Real-World Simulations Make The Lesson Stick 

Giving your teams real-world simulations is one of the best ways to enable these training programs to actually change behavior patterns. Instead of making team members sit through an hour of mundane slides and then a multiple choice test at the end, put them in front of real scenarios that they could encounter in their jobs. 

This could be a simulated phishing test using a real email that your business already received. Or perhaps even using industry examples of successful whaling emails that resulted in a data breach. Giving your employees these real tests and asking them to work through them has a number of benefits. 

First of all, most people learn much faster by doing rather than being talked to. Second, running real life scenarios through simulations helps to build muscle memory instead of just focusing on theory. And lastly, simulations create a safe space where people can make mistakes. 

Let people know they won’t be punished for getting things wrong and failing. Why? Because that’s where the best learning moments come from. 

Clear Explanations Beat Technical Jargon Every Time 

One of the main blockers for cybersecurity awareness is its complexity. For non technical roles, hearing a bunch of acronyms and technical jargon can be intimidating. This switches them off and makes them less receptive to the training material. 

In light of this, do your best to remove jargon from your program, or at the very least, carefully explain what it all means. 

Training works best when it uses plain language, and these simple explanations build confidence while explaining the “why” behind what all of these threats mean. 

Leadership Behavior Sets the Tone

When employees are going about their day to day, security probably isn’t one of their top concerns. Because of this, leaders need to make sure they instill a security-first culture so that all of the learnings from these programs actually have an impact.

The best way to do this is through leading by example. Employees will notice if leaders ignore the same rules that they try to promote. This will immediately drop everyone’s shoulders and undermine the importance of security practices. 

When leadership takes security seriously, everyone else will follow. Even small, consistent actions can set the tone and signal how much security is a priority. For example, leaders might share the phishing emails they receive. This makes security a primary collective responsibility, not just a side task. 

Conclusion

Security awareness training programs tend to fail because they are treated like just another box-ticking exercise. If the material is generic, irrelevant, and not based on real-world threats, employees will likely just daydream their way through the program and go about their day without taking on any real knowledge. 

If you want to make your programs have a measurable impact on your security posture, you need to make them support how people actually work. This means making the lessons short and frequent, using real company and industry examples, and making the language simple and clear so that all levels of technical know-how can come along for the journey.  

The end goal is to make good security habits feel natural and automatic right across the company. Not just another annual task that employees need to get through, but something people can see the value in and want to practice every day.