Without some feedback mechanisms, you won’t have a way to evaluate your training strategies. In this video, you’ll learn some techniques for gathering metrics about your security training.
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So how did your security training go? If you’re going to be training groups of people, it’s useful to know how effective that training was, so that then you’ll have an idea of how risky things are going to be in the future. You need some method to assess how well they receive that information. Usually there are checks and measurements you can have in place that can give you some of that feedback.
One method is called a formative assessment. You’re forming your opinion by constantly monitoring the training throughout the entire process. That way you can make adjustments as you go along, and can really target areas that might need a little bit more work. A much more high-stakes assessment is a summative assessment, where you’re finally summarising everything at the end of the training. This is usually done through a final exam, or, in the case of Security Plus, through some type of certification exam.
Although we think of somebody sitting in the room and checking things off of the clipboard, most of this assessment process can be completely automated. It’s very easy to do this, especially over a large scale. And you want to automate to make sure you can receive as much information as efficiently as possible.
One very common centralized way to do this is through something called a Learning Management System, or an LMS. This learning management system allows you to consolidate everything to a central set of systems so that you can go to one place to evaluate and assess how things are going with your training. This LMS gives you very detailed feedback about how your training is going. If you wanted to see everybody who watched a particular video, or you wanted to see who read through a piece of text, or you want to see specific test scores, you can have all of that consolidated within the LMS. This also allows you do tracking over a long period of time across multiple modules, so you can really find every individual and know exactly how their performance is throughout the duration of the training. Not only can you see how your students are doing, the students can also communicate back with you. And having this learning management system in place allows them to leave messages in notes, and you can communicate interactively back and forth all through this central training mechanism.