The need for effective security awareness training is only growing more intense. Often powered by AI, today’s phishing attacks are more numerous, social engineering attacks are more sophisticated, and deepfakes are more convincing.
Your employees run a gauntlet of tricks and deceptions every time they open their inbox or check their texts, and it only takes one lapse of focus for them to click on a link that lets in malware or shares sensitive data.
Continuous training is vital to keep them alert and able to recognize convincing attacks, but one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to security awareness training. Each employee is an individual.
Malicious actors work hard to discover their weak points, adapting tactics, techniques, and content based on their target’s role, industry, or the type of scam. Sometimes they stalk an individual over the long term, learning their business relationships, habits and anxieties so they can lure their marks more effectively.
Training has to match the reality of the threats that each faces if it’s going to work in the long run. The best security awareness training platforms recognize this and make it easy for security personnel to customize training, offering lessons that are adaptive and personalized to varying extents. This article reviews the five best security awareness platforms for personalizing training.
Each employee faces a different set of risks and challenges, depending on their role, access levels, seniority, and working patterns, as well as their personal situations. Personalized training focuses on the individual knowledge and behavior gaps of each worker, instead of making everyone complete the same content. Meanwhile, simulated lures that resemble what people are likely to see in the real world help to prepare them.
Dynamically adaptive training responds to employees’ real behavior, like phishing failures or risky actions, sending targeted follow-up training to those who need it. Offering training that’s relevant for each person’s situation is more likely to engage employees and avoid training fatigue. High-risk people receive more support without making those deemed lower-risk repeat the same training, while security teams can focus their resources more efficiently.
Ultimately, personalization aims to turn awareness training from a compliance exercise into measurable, effective risk reduction.
When you look for security awareness training programs for your company, make sure to check these capabilities:
We investigated five leading security awareness training platforms to compare their personalization and customization offerings.
Hoxhunt has a particularly strong automated personalization offering. Its adaptive phishing training continuously and automatically changes simulations and learning paths, based on each employee’s skill, role, location, and performance. The platform builds individual risk profiles for each employee, based on their department, skill level and responses to past simulations.
The first simulations are standardized to establish a general phishing awareness assessment baseline. As people progress, customization for its broader security awareness training relies on role, department segmentation, as well as adaptive automation.
OutThink draws on broader human-risk signals to combine individual adaptive training with real-time interventions. It automatically pushes different experiences to each user, and utilizes role, observed behavior, knowledge level, industry, current risk, and threat intelligence in initial personalization assessments.
However, because it relies heavily on external behavioral signals, you might miss out on its deeper personalization capabilities if you don’t buy into the wider security stack.
SoSafe offers both personalized learning paths and adaptive simulations. It tailors learning according to the user’s role, language, and work context, with an initial test that assesses each person’s existing security awareness. Employees with greater knowledge can skip basic material.
On the downside, SoSafe’s personalization is based more on inputted factors like role, context, and knowledge than on behavioral and risk triggers.
Hook Security ’s security training awareness incorporates risk-adaptive phishing and relevant microlearning and remediation, connecting training to an employee’s recent mistakes. It customizes training to individual risk score and phishing performance, although without a formal assessment that builds an individualized curriculum.
However, Hook Security’s personalization is more based on segmentation and errors in phishing simulations than on individual, adaptive learning paths.
Usecure ’s uLearn platform delivers personalized training that’s based on a thorough initial assessment. Its onboarding evaluation analyzes each employee’s specific knowledge gaps and risk levels and automatically builds training around them, developing a customized curriculum that reflects role, risk level, behavior, phishing simulation performance, and knowledge gaps.
On the downside, this strong assessment results in training that’s somewhat rigidly structured and less adaptive to continuous, real-time behavioral signals.
Personalization capability is just one of the many factors you need to assess when you look for the right security awareness training for your organization. If you have a smaller or more homogeneous workforce, it might not be a big concern.
But for large companies with diverse teams, it can be very important to find a security awareness training solution that automates personalization, with unique learning paths, adaptive training, and behavior-triggered interventions.
Here’s a clear way to distinguish between the different levels of personalization offered by each of the leading security awareness platforms:
Yes. Security awareness training platforms like Hoxhunt, SoSafe, Hook Security, and usecure personalize training for each employee, using factors like their role, risk level, previous phishing performance, knowledge, and behavior. Some create individualized learning paths and adapt interventions to user behavior.
Yes. Personalized training can support compliance by ensuring employees receive required security education while tailoring additional training to their specific risks. Organizations should still verify that a platform supports the specific regulations and frameworks they need to meet.
Platforms with strong adaptive capabilities include Hoxhunt, OutThink, SoSafe, and usecure. Their approaches differ: Hoxhunt emphasizes continuous individual adaptation, OutThink uses broad risk and behavioral signals, SoSafe combines adaptive learning and simulations, and usecure builds learning paths around individual knowledge gaps.
Traditional programs often give employees the same courses on the same schedule. Some employees might get frustrated by moving too slowly, and others might have knowledge gaps because content moves too fast. Personalized training adjusts content, difficulty, frequency, or interventions according to factors such as each employee’s knowledge, role, risk, and behavior.
When done right, personalized security awareness training should be more effective than traditional training, because employees receive training that is more relevant to their actual knowledge gaps and risks rather than unnecessary one-size-fits-all content. Effectiveness still depends on factors such as training quality, engagement, program design, and how well personalization translates into safer behavior.
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