What Is a Good Survey Rating for Security and Compliance Training?

We received great feedback from many of you after sharing data about completion percentages last month so much that we thought, “What other things can we share from our vast amount of training data?” 

One thing we listed on our tips for successful compliance training programs is looking at how learners are rating the training material and doing analysis on how to improve how the content is being received. We do this on a regular basis to help inform our updates, changes, retirements of training materials and build out our training content roadmap. 

A survey of more than 199 training professionals from the Association for Training & Development (ATD) encourages evaluating your training programs, stating,  “Ideally, this feedback informs decisions around learning programs and the business as a whole…” Getting this feedback can help you refine your training program to be more effective, but you should look at this data like a researcher/scientist.  

Survey ratings are certainly one of the important data points that can measure how your learners are connecting with your training program. One of our customers in Canada recently shared that they had a 4.77 overall rating on a 5 point scale, over six modules they rolled out to their program to around 2,000 users. They used a variety of our training content from different publishing teams and with different styles.

Their rating was higher than what I show for those across all of our customers that used these same modules. This shows the difference good content and how it’s rolled out can make, while keeping in mind best practices for communication, cadence, buy-in, and other factors. Check out our whitepaper for more on this. 

At KnowBe4 we use a simple rating system that asks each trainee to respond with one to five stars asking only three questions after completing the training content:

• Helpfulness of Content
• Length of Content
• Presentation of Content

When you average these together, you get the overall rating of a module. So let’s look at some of our highest rated training materials and some that have a lower rating (full disclosure that we rarely create low rated materials these days and when we do we change them quickly based on feedback or remove them). 

Here are the numbers from the selections we found interesting from December 2022:

Just like when you’re looking for ratings of restaurants in your area on your favorite app, 4.2 stars is pretty good, 4.4 is very good and 4.6 and higher is outstanding. 

One module on our list, Security Awareness Essentials, is not hitting the mark (it’s getting not-so-hot restaurant ratings). That’s likely because it has to be 90 minutes to meet a requirement in the UK. People don’t want to take a 60 minute training session, nevermind a 90 minute one. When we did a comment analysis of this module, length stood out as the main issue.  It’s better to break these up into smaller modules to complete the needed annual timeframe. 

We have done exactly that with our sexual harassment training. California requires two hours of training, but we have modules that are about 30 minutes in length that can be assigned out each quarter. You can also see why we were asked to create more compliance training. The 4.6-star and 4.4-star ratings on our compliance training are really good. 

Ratings are great to have and collect but even more important to review and act upon to ensure your training program evolves to meet the needs of your learners.