Security News > 2021 > August > How to Train Your SOC Staff: What Works and What Doesn't
Training programs have a two-fold benefit to organizations: not only do they help SOC staff learn new skills such as Security Orchestration, Automation and Response and machine learning, which makes them more productive, but training can also cut back on staff losses.
With that in mind, how do you put together a good training program for your SOC? You need to start by knowing your goals, then developing a lesson plan that works with the ways your people want to learn, and execute that plan in a way that works with your organization, not against it.
Don't judge quality by how much time it takes or how difficult it is, rather make sure your training content teaches and changes behavior.
As you're training your SOC analysts, you might want to introduce some offensive security content, so they can start understanding how attackers think.
It's not practical to say to your staff: "Everyone's going to train every Wednesday from 3:00 to 5:00." There are meetings to be scheduled, or a SOC analyst may have to deal with an event.
Training programs are an expense to an organization, but as surveys have shown, offering SOC staff professional development opportunities turns out to be a tool for talent retention.