Security awareness training has long been regarded as a checkbox activity—a once-a-year necessity aimed at meeting compliance requirements. With cyber threats evolving rapidly and human error persisting as a leading cause of data breaches, organizations are rethinking their approach. Today, effective security awareness training is strategic, continuous, and behavior-focused.
The Evolution of Security Awareness Training
The old model entailed once-a-year compliance training, basic phishing examples, and lengthy videos or slides. Training content served up generic modules about phishing, passwords, and malware, with little to no information about current and evolving cyber threats or real-world examples.
Traditional training as described above falls short for many reasons:
- One-size-fits-all formats fail to engage different types of learners.
- Infrequent training leads to poor retention and outdated knowledge.
- Static, boring content doesn’t evolve with the threat landscape.
- Generic content lacks relevance to individual roles and responsibilities.
- Passive delivery doesn’t promote real-world behavior change.
How Security Awareness Training Is Evolving
Now let’s explore how security awareness training is evolving to implement a modern, more effective approach.
This model is all about behavioral change, real-world relevance, and building a strong security culture—not just compliance.
Ready to level up your security training? These actionable steps will enhance your security awareness training and help you build a stronger, more resilient organization.
- From Annual to Continuous Learning
- Swap one long training session per year for frequent modules throughout the year, delivered as more impactful microlearning sessions.
- Host monthly or quarterly refreshers to keep threats top of mind.
- Include real-time updates on emerging threats, such as AI-generated phishing, deepfakes, or QR code scams.
- Provide ongoing reinforcement through tips and reminders.
- From Generic to Role-Based Training
- Whenever possible, tailor content to specific job functions:
- For Finance, discuss threats such as wire fraud and business email compromise.
- For HR, focus on data privacy best practices and social engineering techniques.
- For IT, explore phishing indicators and insider threats.
- Role-based training helps employees understand multiple cyber risks in their context.
- From Passive to Interactive Training
- Send realistic, controlled phishing emails to your employees to gauge how they respond—without the risk of an actual breach. Simulated phishing emails teach users to recognize real threats through practice.
- Introduce hands-on exercises and real-world scenarios. For example, what should you do if you lose your company laptop at an airport? In another example, a finance team member receives an email from the “CEO” urgently requesting a wire transfer to a new vendor account—how should they respond? These incident response scenarios help to build decision-making skills, not just knowledge. These scenarios are great for serving as tabletop exercises or team-based simulations.
- Turn learning into a fun, competitive experience by applying game mechanisms to training. Gamified learning with quizzes and challenges boosts employee engagement and retention while creating a shared sense of progress and accomplishment.
- From Awareness to Behavior Change
- Training that focuses on building secure habits, not just knowledge, helps employees change how they behave in their day-to-day work. For example, don’t just tell staff to “use strong passwords.” Demonstrate how to create one and encourage them to put what they’ve learned into practice by using a password manager.
- Reinforce policies like multi-factor authentication (MFA) usage, device protection, and password hygiene through reminders. Nudge users with a pop-up reminder when they log in without MFA enabled.
- Encourage a “report-it” culture that normalizes spotting and reporting suspicious activity. Provide a one-click “report phish” button in your email client. Reward users who report suspicious activity and share stories of successful outcomes. This empowers users to actively participate in the security ecosystems of the organization.
- Normalize incident reporting without fear of blame. Eliminate shame, punishment, or fear from security mistakes. Instead, use post-incident reviews as teachable moments. Focus on systems improvements, not individual failure.
- Encourage proactive participation in security efforts to inspire employees to make secure behavior the default behavior both at work and at home.
- From IT-Led to Company-Wide Ownership
- Security risks don’t respect departmental boundaries. Addressing them requires diverse expertise and unified messaging. Cross-functional collaboration is essential. For example, you want to launch a phishing awareness campaign but want to collaborate with other teams in your efforts. Legal can vet the messaging, HR helps deliver it in its onboarding process, and Communications creates engaging visuals and reminders. The result leads to stronger adoption, better communication, and shared accountability.
- Executive involvement sets the tone. If execs and board members don’t engage with cybersecurity, no one else will prioritize it either. Leadership should focus on risks, their financial impact, and potential reputational damage. Executives should be actively participating in phishing tests and security campaigns and using MFA (after all, it is probably their accounts that if compromised, can do the most damage!), and openly discussing why these measures are important. This builds top-down support and elevates security as a business priority.
- Security awareness shouldn’t feel like an afterthought or add-on—it should be embedded into onboarding, culture, and daily business operations. New hires should be onboarded with security training that’s interactive and part of their daily essentials. Incorporate security into all company meetings, internal communications, and team practices. Security training needs to meet people where they are—in the flow of their daily tools and habits.
Core Components of a Modern Security Awareness Program
A modern program goes beyond checking a compliance box to proactively reduce human risk by educating, engaging, and empowering employees across various threat paths. Here are some elements to incorporate in your security awareness program for maximum impact:
- Phishing simulations
Include regularly scheduled phishing tests to assess your staff’s ability to identify and react to outside phishing threats. Test different types of common and advanced threats, such as fake file shares, CEO fraud, and MFA alerts. This practice builds real-world detection skills, helps to identify those who may need additional training/support, and reinforces a culture focused on reporting suspicious activities. - Social engineering awareness
Define and provide examples of different social engineering methods, such as vishing (phone-based attacks), smishing (text-based attacks), QR code scams, and impersonation (deepfakes). Employees should be aware of how scammers use a sense of urgency, fear, and curiosity to manipulate human emotions. - Password & MFA best practices
Identify best practices for creating and managing strong passwords. Encourage staff to use password managers to securely store and manage their passwords. - Remote work security
With many employees still working from home, make security a part of remote onboarding and provide regular refreshers for those who have worked remotely for a while. Provide guidance for securing home networks, personal devices, and cloud applications. Include best practices for VPN usage, patching, physical privacy (camera/mic control), and keeping personal and corporate data separate. - Physical security and device hygiene
Physical breaches often lead to digital compromise. Emphasize the importance of locking workstations when not in use, securing physical documents, and avoiding tailgating. Offer guidelines for clean desk policies, the secure shredding of documents, protecting devices while traveling, and other travel-specific security checklists. Cover how to recognize tampered or suspicious devices, such as USB drops in the parking lot. - Insider threat detection and prevention
Insider incidents often go unnoticed and can have a damaging impact. Teach users how to recognize the red flags for malicious or negligent insiders. Make sure employees know how to safely report concerns over suspicious behavior or access abuse. - Secure data handling
Mishandling sensitive data is a compliance risk that can also damage your organization’s reputation. Define how to classify and label data properly, especially personally identifiable information, or PII, and any financial data. Share how to use secure file transfer methods and tools. Explain regulations like GLBA, HIPAA, GDPR, and other industry-specific requirements, and provide role-based training tailored to different teams such as HR, finance, sales, IT, etc.
Metrics for Success
A modern training program doesn’t just track who took the training—it measures whether it’s working by looking at real-world behavior, awareness, and risk reduction. Here are some key metrics that will indicate the effectiveness of your training program:
- Phish click rates over time
Measure the percentage of users who clicked on simulated phishing emails. Monitor the click rates by department, job role, and region, and keep track of them over time to determine the trends. Monitoring these metrics over time reflects the ability to spot suspicious emails. This helps to identify any vulnerable users who may need extra training or support. - Training completion and quiz scores
Are users engaging with the training content and retaining it? Measure the completion rate of assigned training modules. How much time was spent on training versus skipping through the content? Analyze the quiz scores, especially on high-risk topics such as phishing, social engineering, and MFA. Evaluating the results helps to establish accountability and baseline knowledge. - Reporting rate of suspicious emails
Are employees recognizing and reporting threats successfully? Measure the percentage of users who report simulated phishing attempts and the time it takes to report a suspicious email. Calculate false positives versus true positive reports—both of which are useful. Tracking the ratio shows learning accuracy. - Adoption of secure behaviors
Are users embracing secure habits? Measure MFA enrollment and usage across the organization. Is there an increase in the adoption of secure file-sharing tools? Are more users applying software updates, using a password manager, or locking their screens when they walk away? Awareness is only valuable if it translates into employee action. Tracking these behaviors demonstrates program effectiveness beyond the training modules.
Human error drives the majority of security breaches, making employee enablement essential to reducing risk. With new threats emerging daily and increased regulatory expectations, organizations must prioritize security awareness as a core business function—not a checkbox.
A modern program that is continuous, contextual, and focused on real behavior change will not only reduce risk but also empower employees to be active defenders of the organization.
Updated annually, CampusGuard’s available security awareness training modules are highly relevant to all employees and focused on protecting and reducing risk to sensitive information within your organization.
Our information security and privacy teams are continuously reviewing new risks and threats to your environments, ensuring that CampusGuard’s training content reflects up-to-date requirements and best practices to proactively protect your organization and data.
Want to learn more about CampusGuard’s security awareness and compliance training? Request a free demo or contact us to get started!
