Cybersecurity 101

The client, an international aviation safety training organization, was merging content from another acquisition, and the entire Internet Security Training Program needed to be revised to include all employees across the entire enterprise. 

Each company had its own training developed by its own teams, and with the merger, the same materials were delivered to multiple business units across the globe. It was decided that a standardized approach and delivery was more efficient as well as meeting the regulatory standards and policies in place for internal training. 

The Internet Security Training Program was to be broken into several content-specific courses, each using general "all-purpose" content that was usable by both entities.

Using content from both organization's current courses, I analyzed what was common throughout; this was to be the basis and foundation of the Program's content. 

Stripping out organization-specific elements and replacing with internal or AI-generated content took away an "XYZ Inc." focus and provided a more general audience feel. This way, no one business in either organization would be overrepresented. 

Once this outline was completed, I sent it for approval from the IT Team and Leadership to begin the design/development phase of the Project. 

With the approved content, rebuilding began. The vested Team consisted of several SMEs and middle management, all of whom needed to be involved in the content review process, so a Rapid Prototyping and Gradual Release approach was taken, providing working iterations of each course (5 in all) for review, allowing me to work on all courses in one way/phase or another. 

Videos were added and scripting written (internally and revised as needed by SMEs), laid in, and closed captions added when final narration was approved. This provided a multi-modal approach to content delivery, with on-screen content kept to a minimum, serving more as supporting and supplemental information to the narrated content.

The overall success of this initial course of the Training Program was evident from feedback from SMEs and Management. Sanitizing the content to address all employees in both organizations prevented it from becoming too heavy toward one or the other, which could disrupt internal behavior.

• Seat time was reduced by nearly 15 minutes from one of the originals, and by about 5 minutes from the other. This reduction in seat time, carried over to several thousand employees across both organizations, resulted in significant cost savings.
• As this was the first of five courses to be built, the layout and format for the remaining courses were already set, reducing my development time and saving the company money.
• Because only need-to-know content was integrated, with real-world case studies and scenarios, the content was also more recent and thus more relevant to users as a whole (addressing my "Three R's Model").