A few years ago I received my cyber security training in the form of an email. It was a company- wide message from our Director of Finance. She urged us to be alert for phishing attacks when opening or taking action on emails. The night before, she had received an email from our CEO, requesting a cash wire transfer. Not the strangest request, but it warranted a closer look. Sure enough, the sender’s address wasn’t our CEO’s, even though the name field was. Whew! That was close.

For our small company, this was an important wake up call. There are malicious grinches out there with just enough information and mean spirit to do some real damage. Prior to this incident (and a few others that followed) it didn’t seem at all necessary to deploy company-wide cyber security training.

Click Through That Compliance Cyber Security Training

If you’ve worked for a company regulated by Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI, or HIPAA, then you’ve probably clicked through your share cyber security compliance training. So many companies filter their employees through this type of training, but is that enough? 

IT security is to a company as white blood cells are to the human body – isolating threats and keeping them at bay. When that layer gets compromised, it can turn into a problem in a hurry. Fortunately, keeping things locked down can be as simple as keeping vigilant, and making cyber security part of company culture – just like regularly washing hands or taking a daily multivitamin.

The Human Factor

Have you ever followed someone through an unmanned security checkpoint after they’ve blipped their badge at the door’s proximity sensor? If you have, you realize humans are, indeed, the weakest link in any security configuration. The same is true for cyber security. Non-vigilance can be very costly. How costly? Most sources estimate cyber crime is responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Juniper Research Ltd. predicts that by 2019, the total loss will be around $2 trillion dollars globally. That’s just north of Italy’s GDP.

Not Just Cash at Stake

Money is generally the motivation for cyber attacks, but there are non-cash losses that can be equally, if not more, costly. According to the 2017 Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report, it can take anywhere from hours to months for a firm to shore up defenses following an attack. Recovery time can represent an enormous cost to a company, as technology experts scramble to stop the bleeding and get back to business as usual.

Your customers trust you, your brand, and your product. A single cyber security breach can compromise it all overnight. The Target payments network breach in December of 2013 cost the company $18.5 Million in settlements to 47 states (not Wyoming, Wisconsin or Alabama, in case you were wondering). And the settlements were eclipsed by the $202 Million in legal fees.

Espionage to Gain an Edge

“What’s my competition up to?” “It sure would be great if I could read the emails of my political opponent.” “I bet if I took this piece of code with me when I quit, I’d be really valuable to a competing firm.” Corporate data is closely-guarded for good reason. For some manufacturers, trade secrets are the only element keeping them in business.

Who Are These People?

Verizon’s 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report indicates that while three quarters of cyber crime is committed by outsiders, “25% involved internal actors.”

The same report found that organized criminal groups are responsible for just over half of cyber crime. A staggering 18% of breaches involves nations infiltrating other nations’s systems.The 2016 United States presidential election is certainly indicative of the new normal that is state-sponsored cyber crime.

How Does This Happen?

Up your password game. Oh, and stop installing stuff you find in pop-up ads. 51% of breaches use something called “malware” as their vehicle.

These are small, programs that, once installed, can grab your data and activity. Not surprisingly, 66% of malware installs via malicious email attachments. And 81% of hacking-related breaches take advantage of stolen and/or weak passwords. So think of that the next time you decide to change your password to “Passw0rd!”

What Are They Looking For?

The majority (73%) of this crime is financially motivated, and about 21% of it is espionage-related. It just so happens the Kremlin’s hacking is of the financial AND espionage variety.

How Can We Protect Ourselves?

Lock systems down like your company’s assets and reputation depend on it (because they do). Invest in opportunities for IT personnel to remain current on keeping systems secure.

You’ll find the lowest-hanging fruit in training. Not the page-turner compliance variety, but real, meaningful, and engaging cyber security training. Start with a heavy dose of “what’s in it for me?” so that learners feel ownership and can get a sense of the huge effect, for good or for bad, that small actions can have.

Put your best instructional designers on this job and pair them with subject matter experts that have the time, knowledge, and attitude to advise on content. Also, continually update this training, as the cyber security landscape is constantly evolving. Open a communication plan to expose employees to cyber crime news stories.

It’s not a bad idea to launch mock attacks before and after training with different sample groups in your organization. Use one of these free mock phishing simulators to test your learners. If your team of instructional designers, subject matter experts, and facilitators has done the job, the numbers of duped employees should drop significantly. This is also a great way to demonstrate the worthiness of precious resource spend.

Lastly, stop thinking of cyber security training as an event or even a series of events. It’s a process of continual improvement with far-reaching ramifications.

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3 reasons why post-secondary online learning is absolutely crushing it

A few weeks ago I ran across a Twitter post that read,

“1998: Don’t get in strangers’ cars. Don’t meet people from Internet. 

2017: Literally summon strangers from the Internet and get into their car.”

So true, isn’t it? It’s astounding how technology can cause major shifts in behavior. What we will and won’t do, and certainly how we transact, interact, and learn.

If you’re old enough to have been conscious in the mid 1980s, you might remember a commercial where Sally Struthers peddled degrees in gun repair or child day care. To think that one could earn some sort of degree without committing to time in a classroom was a questionable if not laughable proposition.

Here we are, 25 years later. Distance learning has not only surmounted the Struthers stigma, but we’re seeing a shift in the offerings at institutes of higher education. ELearning is the norm and learners of all ages expect learning to be at least blended if not entirely online.

Enrollment numbers at the university where I attended graduate school indicate a dramatic shift from classroom attendees to distance learners. So much, in fact, that the university recently made their biggest ever cut to staff and faculty positions. The reason was a downturn in student enrollment. The only area in the university still growing? Online learning. The same story is happening everywhere. So why has eLearning suddenly established so much traction at colleges and universities? Here’s some insight.

Reason #1 – ELearning is efficient like a solar-powered car

ELearning works in higher education for a lot of the same reasons it works in corporations. It allows us to achieve more with fewer resources. Well-executed synchronous or asynchronous deployment can be absorbed by learners at their pace without necessarily needing costly classroom space.

Ask any corporate eLearning developer how they rapidly develop learning assets and you should hear something about “reusable learning objects.” This is a fancy name for the practice of cataloging chunks of content so that they may be used in future lessons. Spending costly development hours to build something that’s already built is wasteful. So as chunks of content are built, they should be tagged, organized, and cataloged for future use.

Reason #2 – There are fewer college students

Despite the economic strain a college education puts on families when our economy suffers a downturn, college-aged students tend to ride out the storm by burrowing deep in the nest of higher education. Caroline Hoxby, Stanford economist explains the phenomenon in, How the Financial Crisis and Great Recession Affected Higher Education. She explains that in spite of the fact that it’s even more of a stretch to pay for college during tough economic times, enrollment has gone up during every recession since the 1960s.

During times of economic strength, however, students are lured away from the books to pursue opportunities in the workforce that are too good to pass up.

Reason #3 – ELearning fits with digital native expectations

If Millennials came out of the womb clutching a mouse and navigating a touchpad, it could be said that members of Generation Z were born texting, posting, sharing, and vlogging. And as unappealing as traditional classroom learning is to Millennials, members of Generation Z are far more likely to opt for non-classroom learning options.

Be sure to read Cait Etherington’s article recounting Purdue University’s acquisition of Kaplan Inc.

In general, instructional designers in higher education have yet to fully incorporate some of the hottest modalities in the eLearning space. It’s only a matter of time before a college-level course includes things like complex branching scenarios, mobile learning, augmented reality (think Pokemon Go) and gamification. We should expect learning to become more organic and more akin to the types of learning students seek out on their own time.

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Type “microlearning” into your favorite word processing application. If you haven’t added it to your dictionary as I have, it’ll be flagged as a misspelled word. Suffice to say, microlearning is a pretty new concept. 

Microlearning is just as it sounds – very short, and specific bursts of content – usually video – and usually controlled by the learner. I imagine microlearning to be the greatest benefit to an acrophobic guy high atop his roof needing a tutorial on installing roofing shingles. “Please give me only what I need to know in as little time as humanly possible so I can get down. I’m scared.”

Structuring content into short bursts has huge advantages. First of all, learners don’t get bored. They don’t have time to. So the retention per second rate is likely to be really high.

It’s also ultra-portable. At only a minute or two in length, even high-quality video content won’t bust the bandwidth bank, and can be easily accessed on a mobile device.

It’s also a lot easier for a learner, who also happens to work full-time, to fit microlearning into a busy work day. Check out this article by Sayantani Banerjee that illustrates microlearning’s advantages in a retail setting.

On the development side, microlearning is a really satisfying for developers. It’s far easier to manage updates to many tiny pieces of content than it is to hunt and peck for elements from one large course that needs updating

So now that we’ve established that rather than 24 minutes of content, we’re talking about more like 2 to 4 minutes, let’s look at three really easy techniques to deploy microlearning to your learners.

Technique #1 – Video

When our rooftop friend decided to do the work himself without hiring a contractor, he probably thought it would be super easy. Once he learned otherwise, all he had was his phone and two sets of white knuckles. He probably went to YouTube. It’s quick, and he knew he could probably learn what to do by watching someone go through the steps.

Video is more powerful than the best-written set of instructions could ever be. Short videos are also really easy for a learner to scan through. I’m a huge fan of those really short cooking videos. You know the ones where it’s just a set of arms doing all the prep with written instructions. “I don’t need to know the origin and history of the cassoulet – it’s 6:45 and my family is hungry. Show me the steps.”

Technique #2 – Infographics

Without a cumbersome page-turning presentation, and lengthy monotonous narrator, infographics allow us to see data represented in a super-engaging and interesting way that often incorporates humor, color, and the opportunity to consume it in 3 minutes or 3 seconds.

Infographics fit very neatly into the microlearning category and work great as stand alone learning assets. They do require a good degree of fortitude in the area of visual design, so if you really want your infographic to have maximum impact, be sure to at least consult with, if not commission, an adept designer when planning your project.

Technique #3 – Quizzes

Discover what Cosmopolitan magazine has known for decades – People love to answer questions and tally up results to gain insight about themselves. Short quizzes are super interactive, and with the promise of some result, the creator is able to gather really helpful information from learners while tapping into something called the “self-serving bias” – our innate desire to receive flattering information about ourselves.

Quizzes have the power to create a sense of urgency that purveyors of all sorts of products and services are always hoping to generate. And for the person taking the quiz, if it happens to be really fun and/or insightful, the quiz is likely to be shared on social media.

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