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Why ISS switched from KnowBe4 to Guardey to boost training participation

About International School of Stavanger

The International School of Stavanger is a Norwegian institution providing English-language education for students aged 3 to 18. They have over 130 staff members and 650 students.

We spoke to Martin Sirotnak, IT manager at The International School of Stavanger, about how they switched from KnowBe4 to Guardey to improve both the training experience and the admin experience.

Challenge: finding a less time-consuming and more relatable training program

“As a school, the most valuable asset we have is the data of our students and their families. We need to protect that data at all costs. That’s why we want to make sure our employees get security awareness training.”

“We used to use KnowBe4 for security awareness training. The content on there was OK, but very enterprise-focused. It took me ages to prepare the training programs, which I had to manually select from their content library. I had to review the content at least twice to ensure I understood what I was asking our staff to learn. Besides that, much of KnowBe4’s training content was very long-winded and boring. Some of the content was up to 20 minutes long, including monotonous videos that would drag on.”

“We wanted to switch from KnowBe4 to a new training solution that would improve participation and offer better content for schools.”
Martin Sirotnak IT Manager at International School of Stavanger

“We wanted to switch to a new training solution that would improve participation and have better content for schools.”

Solution: a training program specifically made for schools

“We collaborated with Guardey to help create a training program specifically made for schools. This content is essential because it’s much more relatable for the teachers. It gives them the insights that schools are in fact a very interesting target for cyber criminals and shows them what cyber threats look like in a context that they recognize.”

“Our employees take on a short challenge every week that takes them about a minute or two to complete. With KnowBe4, they would have to spend up to 50 minutes a month on security awareness training.”

"Guardey's education program is essential because it’s much more relatable for teachers. It gives them the insight that schools are in fact a very interesting target for cyber criminals.”
Martin Sirotnak IT Manager at International School of Stavanger

“As an admin, switching to Guardey has saved me a lot of time. The weekly challenges are all automatically planned and the teachers get an email when it’s ready. I don’t have to spend hours at a time preparing the content anymore.”

Result: training participation has skyrocketed

“Many of our employees like the fact that they are competing with other departments. They really enjoy the friendly competition. This is helpful because they motivate each other to do the training so that they can stay ahead of other departments on the leaderboard. I can see exactly which departments are doing well. I was surprised to see that the department that performs best, used to have the most trouble with the KnowBe4 content. The teachers that used to be against security awareness training the most, are now the most active.”

“The participation during training has been way better than with KnowBe4. Guardey’s challenges only take a few minutes, while some of the KnowBe4 content would take up to 20 minutes.”
Martin Sirotnak IT Manager at International School of Stavanger

“The participation during training has been way better than with KnowBe4. This is for a large part thanks to the shorter training content. Guardey’s challenges only take a few minutes, while some of the KnowBe4 content would take up to 20 minutes.”

“It’s very nice to work with a company that listens to feedback and acts on it. The team has been very effective and pro-customer, which is really important to us.”

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