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Choose security awareness training by starting with the employee behaviors and organizational risks you need to address—not a vendor’s feature list. Identify the audiences, define observable learning goals, and compare programs on role fit, relevance to your policies and threats, delivery, and measurement. NIST describes this as a customizable, continuously improved learning program intended to change behavior and build a security and privacy culture.
Start with the behaviors employees need to perform
Security awareness training is useful when employees can apply it to their work. Begin by asking what people should recognize, decide, or do when they encounter a risk. For phishing, for example, employees may need to spot a suspicious message, report it through the organization’s approved route, and know what to do if they already responded.
NIST’s small-business guidance frames the questions plainly: “Do our employees know how to spot a phish?”, “Do our employees know how to report if they think they have fallen victim to a phishing attack?” and “Are we regularly training employees to raise their awareness of phishing threats?” Those questions can help turn a broad training requirement into concrete objectives. NIST also notes that AI can produce more convincing phishing messages. NIST small-business cybersecurity guidance
NIST SP 800-50 Rev. 1 recommends a customizable lifecycle program for cybersecurity and privacy learning. It says, “The program should encourage behavior change as part of risk management and lead to developing a privacy and security culture in the organization.” The guidance, published in September 2024, applies to organizations of different sizes and includes suggested metrics and evaluation methods. It supersedes the earlier SP 800-50 and SP 800-16 editions. NIST SP 800-50 Rev. 1
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Use a structured selection process
- Identify relevant risks. Use your policies, work context, and incident experience to decide which behaviors training should address.
- Group employees by role and responsibility. Determine who needs foundational awareness and who needs deeper or specialized instruction; do not assume every employee needs identical content.
- Write observable learning objectives. For example, state that employees should recognize a suspicious request or report a suspected phish through the approved channel.
- Choose appropriate program components. Decide whether lessons, phishing exercises, or other methods fit the objectives. Treat simulations as a possible complement to learning, not a substitute for it.
- Compare vendors against your requirements. Use demonstrations and verify capabilities, integrations, accessibility, support, security and privacy practices, and contractual terms directly with each vendor.
- Set evaluation criteria before rollout. Decide what learning and behavior indicators matter, beyond whether employees completed a course. If using simulations, record message difficulty and context when reviewing results.
- Review and adapt. Use results to update the program as threats, employee needs, and organizational priorities change.
Compare programs against these criteria
| Criterion | What to check |
|---|---|
| Audience and role coverage | Can the approach reach all relevant employees and provide role-specific learning where needed? |
| Risk and policy relevance | Can content reflect your organization’s threats, policies, reporting process, and work context? |
| Learning objectives | Are the intended outcomes explicit enough to assess what employees should know or do? |
| Delivery and administration | Can the employer deliver and administer the program at a cadence that suits its workforce? Verify platform capabilities directly with the vendor. |
| Measurement and improvement | Does the program support evaluation beyond completion tracking, and can results inform updates? |
| Simulation interpretation | If phishing exercises are included, can you assess message difficulty and use results constructively? |
| Procurement fit | Do the security, privacy, integration, support, legal, contractual, and total-cost requirements fit your circumstances? |
This is a practical buyer’s checklist synthesized from NIST’s lifecycle, audience, behavior-change, and evaluation guidance; it is not a scoring rubric published by NIST. The guidance does not establish a universal vendor ranking or price comparison. Legal obligations also vary by jurisdiction and industry, so determine which requirements apply to your organization rather than assuming a general training framework settles them.
Interpret phishing simulations with context
A click rate alone does not establish whether employees are proficient or whether a training program is effective. The difficulty of a simulated message affects how readily a person can detect it, so a raw rate can be misleading when compared across messages, groups, or time.
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NIST’s Phish Scale provides a method for rating the human difficulty of phishing emails used in awareness training. When reviewing simulation results, record the message difficulty and relevant context alongside clicks, and use the findings to guide improvement rather than treating a single rate as a verdict on employees. NIST Phish Scale User Guide (November 2023). NIST’s April 2023 presentation also explains why message difficulty and the human element matter when interpreting click rates. NIST Phish Scale presentation
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Verify vendor claims and organizational fit
Public vendor materials and demonstrations can help you understand a product, but verify specific capabilities, integrations, accessibility, support, data handling, pricing, and contract terms directly for your use case. A feature list does not show whether the program fits your audience or supports the behavior changes you intend to measure.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchDo not treat a vendor’s effectiveness statistic as comparable evidence without checking its original study, scope, date, and methods. NIST’s guidance supplies a framework for building and evaluating a program; it does not rank vendors or establish a universal effectiveness benchmark.
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