Imagine this; what if you were given training just one time, in a 1-hour session with no hands-on practice, for how to do first aid and give CPR and then were never given more training or reminders about how to do first aid and CPR…two years later would you be able to competently perform first aid when someone needed it? Probably not. Probably not even 1 year later, or even 6 months later.
People need to have regularly scheduled training and ongoing awareness in how to do activities competently. You cannot expect to give a 1-hour, often poorly-constructed, training course about information security or privacy and the have the people taking the training know what to do weeks or months or even yeas later. However, this is the situation that occurs in a very large portion of organizations.
It is no wonder that the majority of security incidents and privacy breaches occur as a result of lack of knowledge and mistakes.
Here is the third part of the third article, “Providing Call Centers with Information Security and Privacy Education,” in my July issue of IT Compliance in Realtime, that speaks to this issue…
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Make Awareness Ongoing to Make Security Effective
An effective information security and privacy awareness program must communicate to personnel, outside of the formal training sessions, the importance of observing and maintaining information security and privacy as well as motivate personnel to learn and follow the organization’s information security and privacy policies and procedures. Call center personnel must receive ongoing communications about the situations they deal with every day that involve information security and could result in privacy breaches.
These ongoing communications should occur in a variety of ways to help ensure that all call center staff knows and understands the importance of properly following information security and privacy procedures. Tailor awareness communications and activities to one of the following three types of learners to truly educate all your personnel:
- Visual–These are the folks who learn best through seeing and reading.
- Audio–These folks learn best by listening to information.
- Kinesthetic–These are hands-on learners; those who need to do some type of activities to learn.
Over the years, I have accumulated and documented more than 200 types of information security and privacy awareness communications and activities for businesses to use. Some are available online and others are provided in my book Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program. Most of these would work quite well for call center personnel.
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Tags: awareness and training, call center training, Information Security, IT compliance, IT training, personally identifiable information, PII, policies and procedures, privacy training, risk management, security training