Training Costs

When businesses think about investing in social media technology platforms, they should also consider training costs and allocation of resources. As with most security processes, good training pays more dividends than just buying a tool. Most regulations, such as PCI DSS and the HIPAA Security Rule, include a training component that has to be in place to meet the requirements. Several different training are available to a company.

Documentation This is the very basic training process of sending out documentation to your employees that they have to read. While documenting policies and distributing them is important, relying on documentation alone is the most inconsistent training method. You don’t know if employees are actually reading and absorbing the material and there is no real great way of incrementally updating the training material. It is very difficult to obtain any reliable data from this type of process to report on training activity. Costs to send out written material are negligible. But creating the material can be costly.

CBT Online, or CBT, training is better and can target hundreds or thousands of employees easily. CBT training is probably the best use of resources to get the information out to a wide audience and, at the same time, verify the audience is absorbing the material by testing them at the end of the online course. You can develop reports on users who have taken the course and passed the tests. Typical online courses can run from $15 per user and upward.

Instructor Led Classroom instructor-led training is the best, but it is much more expensive and not very scalable. It is probably the best way to convey the material, but instructor-led training is usually reserved for courses like sexual harassment or detailed technical courses. You can develop reports on users who have taken the course and passed the tests. You can expect costs to range from $1000 per day and upward.

Depending on your budget, you have to follow one of these paths. The H.U.M.O.R. Matrix has taught you to know the answers to these questions:

Do you have a policy in place that defines training requirements?

Who will manage the workload or training?

What is the cost of implementing and managing the training program?