What is a Good Completion Percentage for Security and Compliance Training?

Completion percentages on compliance and security training campaigns have become a popular topic of discussion.

In a draft of National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) recent report on measuring effectiveness of these training programs, they cited completion percentages as the highest indicator of the health of your program. Not too long ago we released a popular whitepaper, webinar, and infographic addressing the topic of getting more users to complete training. As part of that we talked to a number of organizations that were at 100% completion on required training, or darn close.

But what is a good completion percentage? As the largest provider of security awareness training and a growing provider of compliance training, we thought it might be interesting to look at this data within our customer base and share it with you. 

The results were interesting because I thought they would have been lower, but maybe that is my bias from talking to so many people that are struggling with getting people to complete.  Also, as you can see it depends on the training type and format, but there are pretty small variations. Hopefully these results can help you set goals for your program and get buy-in from leadership that are identified as a critical factor for success. 

The following table was taken from the required training campaigns running from September 1, 2022 and ending on or before October, 31, 2022:

This sample of content shows that many organizations are getting between 97-99% completion rates. Averages can be misleading, for instance in our sample there might be someone who is getting 88% and another three companies getting 100% using the same training, this averages out. 

Also, completion percentages shouldn’t be the only thing you measure for the success of your programs. Using assessments, audit results, and user rating/comment data are some examples of what to consider when evaluating the effectiveness of your training programs. 

One result that is interesting though is that the Ethics training (highlighted in the table above) on the same platform, with the same high quality content as the security training, got great results. If you are interested in learning more about Compliance Plus to get these types of results, schedule a free demo below.