Your Employees Passed Security Training. Would They Pass a Real-World Test?

Key takeaways

• Completing a course shows participation, not how someone will act when an urgent request arrives.
• Useful training ties a recognizable situation, like a payment change or a password reset, to a specific next step.
• Practice works best when it rehearses the decision and builds confidence in pausing to verify.
• Track the behaviors you want, such as verifying payments and reporting suspicious messages. Then fix the process gaps behind them.

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Employees can complete every security awareness training module and still fall for a convincing phishing email or a call that sounds like their CEO.

Completing training shows that someone finished a course. It doesn’t necessarily show what they will do when an urgent request arrives during a busy workday.

At Adaptive Security, we believe security education should help employees navigate those moments: recognizing an unusual request, knowing how to verify it, and feeling comfortable pausing before taking action.

Adaptive Security is recognized in the 2026 Gartner® Ditch Security Awareness and Adopt AI-Powered Secure Behavior Management report in the Representative List of Secure Behavior Management Vendors section.

For us, the practical question facing security teams is straightforward: How can a program help employees apply what they learn when a real decision is in front of them?

Start with the decisions employees actually face

A finance employee receiving a request to change a supplier’s bank details faces a different situation from a recruiter opening an unfamiliar résumé or a help desk employee handling an urgent password reset.

Each needs more than a general reminder to be careful. They need a clear response they can use in the context of their work.

For a payment change, that might mean verifying the request through an established contact method before updating account information. For a password reset, it might mean following the identity verification process even when the caller claims to be a senior executive.

Our view is that useful training should connect a recognizable situation to a specific action. Employees should leave knowing what to do next, where to get help, and which requests require additional verification.

Make practice relevant to the moment

Knowing the definition of phishing is different from deciding how to respond to a plausible message.

Consider an employee who receives an urgent call from someone claiming to be the CEO. The caller sounds familiar and asks for a sensitive file before an upcoming meeting. The useful habit is to verify the request through a trusted channel, even if nothing about the voice sounds obviously suspicious.

Practice can help employees rehearse that response before they face the pressure of a real request. The learning opportunity is in the decision: what prompted concern, how the employee checked the request, and what they could do differently next time.

At Adaptive, we believe these experiences should build confidence. Employees need to know that asking questions and reporting uncertainty are welcome parts of protecting the organization.

Look for evidence that learning carries into work

Course completion remains useful for tracking participation. Security teams also need to understand whether employees can apply the lessons.

A practical starting point is to define the behaviors the organization wants to encourage. Those might include verifying unusual payment requests, reporting suspicious messages, or asking for help before sharing sensitive information.

Then examine where the process breaks down. Do employees know how to report a suspicious request? Can they find the verification procedure quickly? Do they feel able to challenge an urgent instruction from someone who appears to be in authority?

Those questions can reveal opportunities that another training assignment alone may not address. Sometimes the improvement is a clearer process, an easier reporting path, or visible support from leadership for taking time to verify.

The outcome we want is an employee who knows the safer next step and has the support to take it.

Read the Gartner report

Gartner subscribers can read Ditch Security Awareness and Adopt AI-Powered Secure Behavior Management.

Gartner, Ditch Security Awareness and Adopt AI-Powered Secure Behavior Management, William Candrick, Alex Michaels, 22 September 2026

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