What to Consider When Making A Course Plan

You want to create a course plan that really fits your organization's needs and structure. But how do you do this properly? Which elements are key to a successful awareness training program and which elements are free to play around with according to your specific needs?  

To make a great course plan that fits your needs, we recommend that you: 

1. First, identify the pain points in your organisation - and be specific.
2. Use our recommended course plan as a guide.
3. Keep the frequency and number of courses similar to the recommended course plan.
4. Keep the starting package.
5. Other than that, swap out or add courses as you like. 

As you are making your own course plan, you can keep track of it in our course plan builder here.  

Now, we'll dive into each of the steps above in more detail.

Identify key worries 

What are the key problems or worries in your organisation that you want the awarenes training to help with? What does your organisation struggle with regarding IT security or personal data? Be specific.

Is it paperwork with personal data laying out on people's desks when they have left for lunch? Do they often use free Wi-Fi on their work devices when travelling or after work?  

Once you have a concrete overview of what you want to solve, then you can look into our platform for courses that cover those pain points. If you need help with identifying specific topics, you are always welcome to contact your customer success manager. 

Use our recommended course plan for the first year as a guide 

We have designed a full recommended course plan for the first year of awareness training. The key elements of the plan are the frequency and number of courses you send out. We recommend 1-2 courses every month or every other month. Read this post to learn more about why this is the ideal frequency.

Decide how many courses you want to send out 

Following our recommendation of 1-2 courses every 1-2 months, you could send out anywhere from 6-24 courses each year. Decide how many courses you want your users to take and go from there. 

Customize your course plan to your organisation's security profile 

The starting package (Awareness Intro, Passwords, Phishing and Personal Data) is meant to be sent out as the first round of courses, so don't mess too much around with that. You want to have the Awareness Intro to set the scene for what will happen and why your organisation is doing the training. The other three courses are meant to give a short and concise introduction to three of the most basic pillars of IT security and personal data. The starting package sets your organisation off to a strong start with awareness training. 

After the starting package, you have several courses to choose from throughout the year. In our recommended plan, we've included many of the courses we generally recommend for all of our users. 

Depending on whether you want to auto-enroll users in each new course every other month, you will have more or less courses to select on your own for your organisation. This is where it's up to you to decide what your organisation could benefit the most from and how many courses you want to give them. 

What you can change

Now that you know which courses might help solve your problems, you can start thinking about which courses you want to swap from the recommended plan.  

After the starting package, there is no problem with changing what courses your colleagues get or the frequency of courses - as long as you stick to our recommended intervals.  

There's no specific course order you need to follow