Nowadays, it is crucial that you make security a top priority. With the right approach, it not only saves you massive headaches, but also a considerable amount of capital—particularly if you leverage the appropriate solutions for SMBs. As a managed service provider, we can ensure that you implement the appropriate IT solutions to maximize the return on your security investment.

Your business' IT security effectiveness relies heavily on how well your technology works. With this in mind, educating your staff on their responsibility to safeguard your business’ digital assets is important. Let’s explore the key priorities businesses need to consider to establish a robust security training platform that works to protect those assets.

The effectiveness of your business’ IT security is largely contingent on how your IT operates. As a result, it is extremely important to ensure that your staff understands the role they play in protecting your business’ assets. This month, we discuss what you should prioritize when putting together a security training platform; an essential part of any business’ attempts to keep their IT secure. 

On the surface there is nothing abnormal or wrong about this scenario. The problem, however, that dropping a new hire into the fray with a copy of the employee handbook and a day-and-a-half of software and sensitivity training may actually not be the best way to handle your human resources. This month we are going to talk about how creating a sustained training platform can actually have a marked effect on your business’ ability to stay secure and productive. 

Education vs. Experience

The first place we’ll start is with the hiring process. Many organizations prefer to hire people that have a college degree of some sort. While that may be prudent if you are hiring people for a specialized job, many entry-level job postings are now requiring college degrees, often to the organization’s detriment. Since college graduates are likely to command a higher salary--and they didn’t go to college (and often assume large amounts of debt) to work entry-level jobs--they typically get impatient with their professional growth and hop from job-to-job until they find something more to their liking. In fact, people who have graduated from college since 2010 have averaged four job changes in their first nine years. 

That’s not the only thing. You have people whose education doesn’t match up with the demands of the jobs. People that get their degree in a certain discipline and didn’t work a job relating to that discipline for years, are often further behind than people who have experience in the field. Then you have that person who applies, but majored in Latin in college. Most businesses would be better off filling the position from within than hiring someone from outside the company and lacks real-world experience in the job.

This is where training comes in. For the college graduate who has been exposed to different perspectives, disciplines, and rules than the people that work real-world jobs are exposed to the practical knowledge necessary to troubleshoot even basic problems in a business setting may be a little troublesome to start with. There’s a reason why your average mechanic, plumber, and electrician keep being able to raise their rates: they’re experienced and trained.

Types of Training

The first thing that should be mentioned is that dedicating a lot of time and resources to employee training can become expensive. This is likely why a lot of people don’t do much of it. There are five major types of training that most organizations offer, in varying degrees. They are:

Orientation

Every business has some form of orientation. This is a short run down of the expectations of an employee by management.  Orientation will show new hires all the relevant information about what it means to be an employee at the company. Some businesses go into detail about things like the company mission, values, corporate culture, leadership information, employee benefits, administrative procedures, and any other tasks that need to be completed before any actual training begins. 

Onboarding

Onboarding is different than orientation. When you are onboarding your employees, you train them in the specific duties their job entails. This could be training on software systems they need to be accustomed to using, or training on how your business wants them to complete specific tasks. The idea is to make new hires as effective as possible, as quickly as possible. Some jobs come with a half-a-day of onboarding, while others take over a year to complete. 

Mandatory

There are some things that workers need to know, regardless of the position they hold. Some mandatory training is dictated by Federal and State governments, while others are strictly industry-wide points of emphasis. Public sector jobs often are required to take occupational health and safety courses. This practice is becoming more and more prevalent in the private sector, as is sexual harassment training.

Operational Skills

Skills training is designed to improve an employee’s ability to do the work, or to fill in other positions in your company. There are soft skills training and technical skills training. Soft skills training is designed to improve an employee’s ability to interact with others; and, with the company. These skills include:

• Presentation and communication
• Problem solving
• Conflict resolution
• Time management
• Collaboration
• Emotional intelligence
• Adaptability

Studies have shown that a dedication to soft skills training works to resolve the normative problems with high turnover and unsuccessful collaborative culture.

Technical skills training enhances the technical proficiency of an employee. Any time employees can get better at the technical aspects of their jobs, it improves the products and services the company they work for delivers. 

Security

Nowadays, with the circumstances that modern workers have to consider, security training is an absolute must. Not only does it improve employees’ ability to protect business assets, it ensures that they are aware of the potential problems that the modern business is exposed to. 

Physical security training is typically limited, but if it is a major part of a person’s role within your company to keep assets secure, they should be given the information needed to accomplish this task. 

What’s more likely is that each person will need to take part in cybersecurity training. Digital assets are routinely targeted by people inside and outside of your business, so knowing how to protect them is a major point of emphasis that decision makers have to consider. The average worker needs to know how to identify a phishing attack, the best practices of data transmission, and what are good and bad practices when interacting with cloud-based and other online-based resources.

At Coleman Technologies, we know just how important keeping malware and unwanted visitors out of your network is and can help you with your cybersecurity and network security training platforms. Our team of professional IT technicians, and our dedication to helping businesses keep hackers from negatively affecting business, can go a long way to help you establish the training platform you need to keep your business' digital assets secure. Call us today at (604) 513-9428 for more information.

Why Your Employees Need Training
The most notable reason to provide training for your employees starts from their first day on the job, when they might need to be educated on how to use the solutions your organization depends on. This might be time-consuming, but it is critical if you want to save time in the long term. Training employees as soon as possible will mean you’re not leaving employees to figure it out for themselves.

Even more experienced employees will need training every now and then. The average employee will only retain about 40 percent of what is covered during their introduction to a topic, making education a critical part of maintaining operational productivity. Since technology is changing often, you should take some time to improve your training processes.

Training Options
There are many different ways to approach employee training, but one common factor among them all is pairing a new employee with an experienced one to teach them a thing or two about the process. On-the-job training is a practical way to make sure that instruction is taught by someone who knows what they are doing, and it can even help develop relationships between your workers.

On the other hand, when a new technology is introduced to the workplace, your entire staff might need to know how to use it. In cases like this, you can use webinars to help employees “self-teach” themselves on how to use it. Avoid holding all of this training in a single session, though, as it’s better to spread it out so as to avoid a situation where your employees are stuck in training for a week at a time. Some organizations have had success in splitting their teams up into internal groups to help employees learn as much as possible.

If Your Team Needs Help…
A help desk solution is a perfect way to supplement what your employees already know with what they need to know. You can provide your staff with access to trained technology professionals who can provide assistance when it’s needed. Coleman Technologies can help your business get started with technology training and support. To learn more, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.