Your employees are your first line of defence when it comes to protecting your business from cyber threats, therefore taking the time to keep your team engaged, informed and up-to-speed in the world of cyber security is critical.
As a vital step in reinforcing a cyber security company culture, training should be fun and rewarding to keep enthusiasm and participation. Interactive, hands-on training usually proves the best results - and that’s where we come in!
Why training is key for your team
1. Stronger incident response capabilities
With a more vigilant workforce, incident response teams remain in a better position to remediate potential cyber threats. Additionally, it encourages prompt reporting and response to suspicious activities or incidents to minimise the impact of cyber attacks. In many cases, building a culture of openness and security awareness can help mitigate internal incidents in the first place.
2. Don’t get caught out by regulations!
A compliance culture must be a core company-wide value, which can only be effective with the buy-in from an entire workforce. No organisation wants to put itself or its customers at risk of data breaches. Complying with cyber security standards and regulations is paramount and should be a standalone reason for implementing a cyber security culture. By regularly training your team, you’ll avoid being caught out by frequently updated regulations.
3. Heightened defences against cyber attacks
Your workforce is the first line of defence, therefore a cyber culture promotes a proactive approach to understanding potential threats, safe online practices, and the responsible use of technology. By fostering a culture of continuous learning and knowledge sharing, organisations can stay updated on the latest threats and best practices, enabling them to raise the overall security posture for heightened protection.
4. Stronger defence against insider threats
Human error accounts for 95% of all security breaches, with the workforce statistically being your greatest security risk. Creating a culture around cyber security awareness in the workplace can significantly reduce the likelihood of breaches. After all, your defence can only go as far as the knowledge of your workforce!
5. Build customer trust
Did you know? 81% of consumers state that trust is a deciding factor in their purchase journey, therefore gaining trust is integral in retaining brand loyalty. It is far swifter to mitigate the risk of breach than damage control this consequence. Having a cyber culture will not only strengthen your security posture but also help your customers feel safe using your services.
The ROI on cyber security training will be more than made up for by ensuring that security breaches are prevented at the source.
6. Opportunities for innovations
Cyber security training not only focuses on defence but promotes a proactive approach to identifying and addressing vulnerabilities. This means that the workforce can keep up-to-date with training, while organisations can better understand emerging technologies, assess risks and implement security measures without hindering innovation. Without training, organisations may miss opportunities to leverage new technologies securely and effectively.
Ways to ingrain cyber security culture
Our Customer Success team recently held a workshop to talk you through the ways in which you can ingrain cyber security training into your company culture. You can rewatch the workshop in this video, or continue reading.
Encourage collaboration
Collaboration and competition within the workplace are great ways to harness the power of motivation. In a work environment, collaborative learning is key to progression, with 75% of employers rating teamwork and collaboration as “very important”.
The TryHackMe platform promotes collaboration throughout, with collaborative workspaces featuring a competitive leaderboard, and King of the Hill, our competitive hacking game that encourages a culture of collaborative teamwork through gamification.
TryHackMe Business promotes workplace collaboration, with hundreds of gamified training labs to upskill and arm your team with the knowledge of tools and practices to mitigate cyber attacks.
Make training engaging
For ultimate job satisfaction and progression, having engaging and interactive training can contribute to employee buy-in and enable teams to get the most out of their learnings. Learners who are engaged, interested, committed, and keen to learn will have increased opportunities to succeed in contributing to a culture of cyber security.
With over 600 engaging and interactive labs for different skill levels, TryHackMe allows businesses to create branded learning paths that align with skill requirements, giving teams relevant, engaging training that can be personalised to job roles, organisations, and industries.
Workforce buy-in
Cyber security should be a priority for an entire workforce, therefore employee buy-in is essential in crafting a cyber culture. All parties must understand the importance of building a cyber culture in your workforce, with engagement, communication and participation vital components when introducing a cyber culture framework.
A fantastic tried and trusted method of ensuring buy-in is to introduce security champions to instil the message and set standards for other team members.
Incentivise your team
Workplace incentives boost morale, motivate your force, and encourage teamwork throughout, with incentives and reward programs proven to increase productivity by 22%. Meanwhile, the study also found that incentives increased engagement by 89%, retention by 87%, and loyalty by 85%.
Incentivising your team is a proven and effective way of motivating and engaging, which is crucially important when implementing a cyber security culture.
With competitive leaderboards within TryHackMe workspaces, you can incentivise your team to internally recognise and reward those at the top of the workspace leaderboard!
Prioritise communication
A crucial step in ingraining a cyber security culture is to promote a culture of openness that empowers employees to speak up about concerns, mistakes, and queries. Without open lines of communication and valued feedback, it’s impossible to create a culture of security.
Employees should feel comfortable using their voice (or even anonymously) and should be rewarded and recognised to incentivise open communication. In addition, it’s vital for security teams to proactively engage with colleagues and seek their input.
How to measure the success of training
One of the most widely used methods of evaluating the success of training is using the Kirkpatrick Model, offering a four-level approach (Reaction, Learning, Behaviour, and Results) to measure the effectiveness of training provided.
Level 1: Reaction
How did the participants react or respond to the training?
As communication is vital in a cyber culture, checking in with your team to uncover how they found the training is crucial. You want your team to feel that cyber security training is valuable. Measuring how engaged they were and how they reacted to the training helps you to understand how well they received it.
Gathering feedback through surveys or interviews allows you to better understand their satisfaction, engagement, and perception of the training. Here are some important questions to ask your team:
- Did you feel that the training was worth your time?
- What were the biggest strengths and weaknesses of the training?
- Did you like the gamified element of learning?
- Was the platform engaging?
- What are the three most important things that you learned from this training?
- From what you learned, what do you plan to apply in your job?
- What support might you need to apply what you learned?
Level 2: Learning
What did participants learn from the training?
You’ll want to find out whether the training has developed their skills, attitudes and knowledge, as well as their overall cyber learning experience. A great way of measuring learnings is to initially create individual learning objectives with your team to accurately measure their progress to date and hold your team accountable.
The TryHackMe management dashboard allows you to easily create branded learning paths aligned with skill requirements, to give your team personalised training.
We recommend conducting assessments or tests to measure the understanding of key concepts, best practices, and specific technical skills to allow learners to demonstrate their knowledge of cyber security principles and techniques.
Level 3: Behaviour
Did the trainees take what they learned and put it into practice on-the-job?
In a critical industry with an ever-increasing risk of cyber attacks, your team’s behaviour and attitudes towards taking precautions are crucial factors. Be sure to introduce processes that encourage, reinforce and reward positive behaviours.
Monitor behaviour changes regarding security practices by observing their adherence to security policies, their ability to identify and respond to threats, their implementation of secure coding practices, or their adoption of secure data handling procedures. You can gather feedback through observations, performance evaluations, or self-reporting mechanisms.
Level 4: Results
Did the training meet the stakeholders’ expectations? What was the return on these expectations (ROE)?
You can evaluate the effectiveness of the cyber security training by examining relevant metrics, such as the number of security incidents or breaches, the time taken to detect and respond to incidents, the reduction in security vulnerabilities, or the overall improvement in the organisation security posture. By comparing pre-training and post-training data in a long-term frame, you can determine the extent to which the training has influenced these outcomes.
TryHackMe features a management dashboard that allows progress monitoring across employees, to understand the results of internal training. This enables you to assess employee progression across cyber security skill sets.
Launch TryHackMe Business!
TryHackMe upskills and arms teams with knowledge of tools and practices to mitigate cyber attacks, and can be a pillar in building cyber culture.
The TryHackMe platform helps businesses train teams in cyber security, from the complete beginner through to the seasoned hacker. Our hands-on training incorporates fun, competitive, gamified learning, enabling your team to gain the transferrable skills needed to form a cyber culture.
With a plethora of labs and training for beginners just starting out in cyber security, we also have labs suited to experts in the field. Our learning paths explore high-level offensive and defensive content and allow security champions and security teams to stay on top of new threats and advances in the industry. Meanwhile, our training modules are perfect for the entirety of your team to build foundations for a cyber culture.
Reach out to our team today to ingrain cyber security training into your company culture!
Ben Spring