Training and Enablement: The Partner as a User Adoption Driver

The default for most organizations when it is thought about for a planned approach to cybersecurity training and enablement is OEM generic webinars. But here’s the reality – workshops delivered by partners frequently trump these generic sessions by a country mile. Some explanation of why that happens, and how it can help you achieve better results with your user adoption programs.

I am going to slice this one up into five easy pieces to give you a framework to work from: OEM Training Gaps, Custom Curriculum, Hands-On Labs, Certification Paths and Measuring Knowledge Retention. By the time you’re done reading, I guarantee it: you’ll understand why partner-led training is actually the more intelligent choice for your cybersecurity team and your business in general.

1. OEM Training Gaps

OEM training workshops typically present a few common challenges that make them less impactful:

• Generic content: OEM webinars pack too much information in, resulting in a broad overview of difficult topics, with little depth. This is the risk of having your team sit through hours of content that is either too basic or too advanced.
• No context: Your OEM likely won’t customize training to your unique installs or challenges. It’s comparing apples to oranges — the case studies and example use cases are almost never what your team is dealing with day to day.
• Passive learning: The vast majority of OEM training comes in the form of webinars or video recordings. Not much of a conversation, but a lot of listening and writing down. We learn better by doing than by watching.
• Little interaction: Since these sessions are large and generalized, it’s hard to receive individualized help. Questions are often brushed aside or postponed, and learners get stuck.
• Generic assessment: Many such trainings do not have measurement of skills, so it is hard to know if the knowledge gained is internalized and implemented on the job.

Therefore, if you’re counting on vanilla OEM sessions, you’ll end up with poor adoption, minimal skill increase, and some very unhappy people. Which brings us to…

2. Customized Curricula

Partner-led learning is exceptional, first and foremost, because it’s based around your guys’ needs, not some template service.

Here’s why customisation matters so much:

• What topics are relevant: Partners will engage with you to learn details of your infrastructure, challenges, and objectives. Then they customize the program to cover precisely what your team needs to learn.
• Role based learning: Different roles require different knowledge. A SOC analyst’s training is different from that of a network admin. Bespoke curricula guarantee that everyone receives what is most useful for his or her job.
• Flexible pacing: Programs taught by a partner can fit the pace: slower for beginners, faster for those who know. This will ensures users are active and no wastage of time.
• Real-life examples: The training is enriched with concrete examples and case studies specific to your business. That makes it easier to figure out how to use new skills.
• Bite-sized modules: Don’t burden your team with marathon sessions; divide training into bite-sized chunks scheduled over weeks. This enhances our focus and retention.

With this level of visibility, partner-led training becomes an enabling function, not a check-box exercise or something partners do because they have to.

3. Hands-On Labs

Where partners really do beat OEM webinars is in offering hands-on experience. Theory is great, but let’s face it: cybersecurity is a do.

Great reasons why hands-on labs are so awesome:

• Practical tools, real environments: Labs enable your team to work with real security software and hardware in a safe environment. This is far better than simply watching someone else demo it.
• Safe to fail: Users can experiment without the fear of breaking something critical. One of the quickest ways to gain confidence is to make your mistakes in a lab.
• Immediate feedback: Most labs offer instant scoring or feedback, so students can know right away what they did well or poorly, and then do better.
• Gain muscle memory: Repetition makes tasks second nature and in a fast-paced cybersecurity world that can be crucial.
• Collaborative problem solving: A few partner-led labs require joint work, a way to mimic actual incident response and develop not just skills but communication and coordination.

Compare that to OEM webinars where you sit and watch a screen and perhaps take notes. Experience is simply a more effective and engaging way to increase user adoption.

4. Certification Paths

Certification provides your team with clear goals and proof of capability. Here, partners often offer higher quality and more relevant certification paths than you’ll find from an OEM webinar.

Consider these points:

• Step levels: Partners create bounded certifications, from beginner to advanced. This develops the sequence a level that allows a learner to develop Confidence in small increments.
• Skills-based: Partner certifications aren’t paper certs, they test on your on the job abilities, not just memorization.
• Career advancement: Certification allows users to clearly picture next steps in career growth, which can help increase motivation and retention.
• Functional recognition: Certifications are often linked to real job roles, so it is a shorthand for managers to know who can do what.
• Recertification support: In a fast-moving cybersecurity world, partners tend to offer ongoing learning and recerts to keep skills as fresh as possible, not just one-time tests.

OEM training usually is not integrated with comprehensive certification frameworks — instead of offering fundamental knowledge of a product, OEM training focused on expertise.

5. Measuring Knowledge Retention

Lastly, the effectiveness of a training effort is not only a matter of what gets taught, but of what gets learned and used. Engaging partners in the political process is crucial, and here partner-led programs have serious advantages:

• Ongoing assessments: Partners include quizzes, practical tests, and refresher modules at intervals to reinforce learning.
• Performance tracking: With LMS platforms, partners provide dashboards that reveal which people are advancing, floundering or in need of more coaching.
• Feedback loops: Partners gather feedback to refine their sessions to ensure the content remain fresh and effective.
• Behavioral change metrics: On top of tests, partners frequently gauge real-world adoption by monitoring how often security tools or recommended strategies are put into practice after training.
• Custom reporting: This allows your leadership to see clear ROI from training investments; you’re not in the dark.

OEM training often revolves around training with post-session surveys (or a one-time final quiz – not nearly enough for retention and change to occur).

Wrapping It Up

So how about if you want cybersecurity training and empowerment that’s actually sticks? Compromise on a partner-led workshop is better than OEM generic webinar. Whether that gap filling is through personalized content, hands-on labs, straight forward certification paths, smarter ways to measure what’s being retained – partners bring the knowledge and customization that your business demands.

You are not just training users; you are empowered them to be fearless and skillful guardians of your digital properties. That’s what partner-led user adoption is capable of, and it’s worth investing in if you’re after better security outcomes and stronger teams.

At the end of the day, this is about much more than ticking boxes with OEM webinars, but about building a growing, skilled user base through effective planned cybersecurity training and enablement.