An out-of-the-box tutor: Kaspersky’s new Security Awareness Training provides every employee with an individual learning path

Kaspersky has unveiled its new Kaspersky Adaptive Online Training, developed in partnership with Area9 Lyceum. The solution generates a security awareness curriculum that is tailored to each individual user’s learning needs, as a personal tutor would do for their students. The content for this new enterprise-grade solution is based on Kaspersky’s cybersecurity expertise and delivered in accordance with modern learning techniques.

Security awareness training is essential to introducing cybersecurity basics to employees and giving staff the information they require so they can work securely. However, many organizations see that some training courses do not necessarily deliver the desired effect. While 21% of them in the Saudi Arabia implement security trainings for employees in some form, only 10% of the organizations surveyed in Saudi Arabia confirm that they have not encountered any IT security issues caused by their employees’ actions[1].  

Mistakes still happen because people tend to forget what they have learned if they are not given the opportunity to retain information properly. For example, the day after a one-hour lecture, participants forget 50-80 percent of the information they have been told, and when 30 days have passed, they can only recall two to three percent of the entire talk. However, employees find that learning about what they already know, and even multiple repetitions of the known facts, can be boring and annoying. To help companies provide essential knowledge without overloading staff, Kaspersky, in partnership with Area9 Lyceum, is presenting its new Kaspersky Adaptive Online Training offering.

The platform builds a specific learning path for each user, taking into account the knowledge that employees already have and their confidence in cybersecurity awareness. To achieve this specific path, Area9 Lyceum’s intelligent ‘biological’ algorithms intermix questions with the content, assessing both the knowledge of the subject and the confidence in responses as an employee studies. The algorithms optimize the path to mastery, skipping over content the member of staff already knows and helping them master concepts and topics they are less familiar with. This way, it may take a skilled employee less than 10 minutes to learn only what they are missing, whereas others may need half an hour to complete the entire module, which gives them more time devoted to learning objectives which are the most difficult for the student. 

The learning content covers passwords, email security, web browsing, social networks and messengers, endpoint security, mobile devices and GDPR (which will be available in Q3 2020) topics. This skillset ensures that employees can work with IT resources with minimal cybersecurity risks. All lessons and tests are built on real-life situations and examples of attacks which have happened in the real world. 

Kaspersky Adaptive Online Training is easy to manage. An administrator only needs to select which modules a group of users should complete, while the solution will send users the necessary link to their required lessons. The solution also provides detailed statistics on employees’ performance and monitoring of students who are confident in insecure actions. 

“As current practice shows, the most difficult task is to motivate, and teach new skills to, employees who make mistakes but are resolutely sure that they do everything correctly. This is called unconscious incompetence. Adaptive learning methodology allows businesses to identify such areas amongst their staff and put more effort into closing the skills gaps, while the rest will not be overwhelmed with unnecessary theory. According to Area9 Lyceum’s estimation, by using an individual learning path approach, companies can save up to 50% of total time spent on training,” comments Elena Molchanova, head of security awareness marketing at Kaspersky.

The cloud-based solution is available in English, German, Spanish, Arabic, French, Italian and Russian.