Best Cybersecurity Awareness Training Tips for Employees in 2025

When it comes to cybersecurity and social engineering, we can no longer afford to differentiate between “technical” and “non-technical” users. If ‘every company is a software company,’ then every employee is, at the very least, a software user and needs to know how to use that software safely.

Security Awareness Training (SAT) has been around a long time, and is probably one of the least-sexy security terms out there. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less relevant today. From our perspective on the network, we see evidence every day of users being duped by phishing and other social engineering attacks, and if we’re seeing the results of these scams, it means something has escaped all the other training and tools that are in place.

That’s why over the years we’ve redefined the Attack Surface to include perhaps the most critical component of any network: The employee. And it’s why most states have passed laws requiring their city, county, and state employees to take regular SAT courses.

Zeroing in on this need, let’s hit the highlights on some of the best cybersecurity awareness training techniques for employees in 2025. 

The Best SAT Strategy

When venturing into the SAT domain, it’s important to clarify what you want from the program before you start. Here is a sample of three critical items to consider when building out your SAT strategy:

• Focus. Only you know your organization, so be sure your SAT program can be tailored to your specific industry. Different industries face different threats, and within your organization it’s also important that your strategy can be tailored to specific employee roles (IT vs. administration or accounting, for example).
• Make it ongoing (and engaging). We’re way beyond once-a-year training that simply checks a compliance box. For an SAT program to be effective, it needs a regular cadence of testing and assessment. More frequent assessments also require that the touches be engaging and  interactive. (See below.)
• Build a trusting security-first culture. We’ve stood on this soapbox 100 times: Build trusting relationships up and down the organization to foster a culture where your employees aren’t afraid to reach out to your team when something looks amiss.

Once you have an idea of where you want to steer your program, you can research which SAT provider best caters to those needs and does so in a way that your workers will want to learn. A lot of that has to do with the way the information is presented.

The Best SAT Tactics

There is a tendency to rush past SAT training as it is usually squeezed into the corner of a busy day, and employees just want to check that box and move on to the next vital task. For that reason, SAT providers have become highly competitive when it comes to winning your employees’ focus and time. Here are some of the techniques they use that have been proven to work. 

• Gamification. To keep things interesting, SAT companies will turn the learning process into a game. This not only makes the act of learning cybersecurity more fun, but the element of competition can be addicting and leads to higher learning and retention rates. In one study, the effects of gamification boosted student learning by as much as 89% over lecture-based education. 
• Interactive Modules. Short, to-the-point modules help employees move at their own pace and do the work on their own time. These interactive tools also allow for more frequent testing and create more variety and engagement.
• Metrics, metrics, metrics. You can’t reach your goals without the metrics to measure your progress. Phishing simulation success scores, training completion rates, and reporting on actual incidents are just a few metrics that can guide the program going forward. The added benefits of these metrics also include employee motivation and justification for the program’s cost.

The Best Advice for SAT Champions (That’s Probably You)

Remember that it’s good to position yourself openly as a trusted resource. In this, you need to give employees the room to fail. 

Position yourself as the  department, consultant, or vendor that clients (again, your users up and down the org chart) can trust with bad news. Not everybody knows this stuff, even the basic stuff. We need to acknowledge this, accept it, and not shame users for not knowing the basics because the fact is – most don’t. Siding with the user against external threats is better than making enemies in both camps.

Being a trusted advisor who anticipates their questions, understands their concerns, and “gets” them at their level (whatever that may be) will do wonders for company-wide buy-in for security awareness training and other top-down programs.

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