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Dive Brief:

• Security leaders are seeing their training budgets increase as their organizations prepare workers for the AI era, the cybersecurity certification firm ISC2 said in a report published on Wednesday.
• Nearly half (47%) of respondents to the ISC2 survey said their companies considered AI the most important skill for their employees to learn.
• The report also delves into how organizations are adapting their training programs to the modern security landscape and dealing with the challenges they face.

Dive Insight:

With cybersecurity risks growing more complex, companies are investing in their workers to combat phishing, ransomware and other threats. Roughly three-quarters (73%) of respondents said their organizations had increased their security training budgets in the past year. One-fifth of organizations exclusively rely on in-house staff to deliver training materials, while 43% mostly rely on in-house staff but also use third-party vendors, and 27% split the work evenly between staff and third parties.

Larger organizations were more likely to report using third-party training companies, perhaps because of the costs associated with those services.

Monthly training sessions were the most popular approach for keeping security personnel up to date with the latest threats and strategies, with 36% of respondents saying they used this approach. Thirty-four percent of respondents said they trained their security teams quarterly, and 15% said they trained weekly.

Companies use a variety of tools to gauge how effective their cybersecurity training programs are. The most popular were employee performance metrics and security incident reduction trends — 52% of respondents said they used each of these tools. Roughly the same percentage of security leaders told ISC2 that they relied on employee satisfaction surveys, audit results and rates of employee certification completions.

Security leaders see time constraints as the biggest impediment to improving their training program’s effectiveness, with more than half (53%) of respondents citing it as a burden. Keeping training material up to date and finding qualified trainers rounded out the top three training challenges.

Nearly all respondents said they paid close attention to the latest technology trends and quickly incorporated them into their training programs. Forty percent said they updated their training materials before trends became widespread, while 54% said they updated their materials as trends emerged. Only 5% said they were “slightly behind” trends, and only 1% said they were “significantly behind.”