How should organisations prioritise security awareness training for the users most likely to cause a breach?

Who should get security awareness training first?

Prioritisation should start with the users whose compromise would create the greatest business impact, not with the largest population. That usually means privileged users, administrators, finance and HR staff, executive assistants, and anyone with access to sensitive systems or high-value workflows. Their mistakes are harder to absorb because they sit closer to the organisation’s most valuable data and controls.

Impact is only one side of the decision. Good prioritisation also considers exposure, meaning which groups are most heavily targeted by phishing, credential theft, or social engineering. A user group that is both high impact and frequently attacked deserves earlier and more intensive training than a lower-risk population.

That is why security teams often separate broad awareness from targeted intervention. General training can reach everyone, but the highest-return effort goes to the people whose actions are most likely to open a path to breach, escalation, or fraudulent payment.

How do you identify the users most likely to cause a breach?

The best signal is a combination of role-based risk and observed behavior. Role-based risk looks at what a user can access, approve, reset, transfer, or administer. Behavioural evidence looks at who is clicking suspicious messages, submitting credentials, reusing passwords, or failing phishing simulations. Either signal alone is useful; together they make prioritisation much more defensible.

It also helps to distinguish between users who are simply “busy” and users whose workflow creates genuine exposure. For example, a person who handles external communications or payment approvals may be a higher-value target than someone with fewer permissions, even if both receive the same volume of spam. The priority should follow the combination of privilege, targeting, and demonstrated susceptibility.

Where possible, use recurring metrics rather than one-off events. Trends in phishing failure rates, reported messages, account recovery requests, and unusual sign-in behaviour give a better picture than a single test. That makes it easier to direct coaching toward the groups most likely to benefit from a change in habits.

How should training be tailored once the high-risk groups are known?

Training should match the failure mode. Privileged users need emphasis on account takeover, session protection, approval hygiene, and the consequences of granting access too casually. Frequently targeted groups need scenario-based training on phishing, impersonation, and urgent-payment deception. Users with weak simulation results need narrower, more practical coaching that addresses the exact mistakes they are repeating.

Broad awareness content is useful for baseline hygiene, but it rarely changes the risk profile by itself. The higher-value approach is to pair short, role-specific lessons with controls that make risky actions harder to complete, such as stronger verification for sensitive requests or additional scrutiny for high-risk transactions.

When training is tied to actual exposure patterns, it becomes easier to measure whether behaviour is improving. That is more useful than simply tracking course completion, because completion does not tell you whether the people most likely to create a breach are less likely to make the same mistake again.

Risk and Threat Considerations

Prioritising training by exposure and susceptibility matters because compromise rarely starts evenly across the workforce. Attackers concentrate on accounts that can approve, transfer, reset, or delegate, and the resulting breach impact is much larger when those users are tricked or take a shortcut under pressure.

Failure mechanism: A high-privilege or frequently targeted user falls for credential theft, impersonation, or a fraudulent request, and that single mistake becomes a pathway to escalation, financial loss, or wider lateral movement.

Impact: The organisation reduces the chance of high-consequence compromise by focusing the first layer of behaviour change on the users who can do the most damage if they are deceived.

Practitioner Guidance

What to prioritise: Build the training queue from highest potential impact first, then refine it with observed exposure and failure data. If a group has privileged access but weak phishing performance, treat it as an immediate priority rather than waiting for a broader campaign to finish.

What to verify: Check that the training list is based on current access rights, not stale job titles. A user who recently gained approval authority, admin rights, or access to sensitive workflows should move up the list even if they were not previously considered high risk.

Practitioner takeaway: The goal is not to train everyone equally, but to reduce breach likelihood fastest by focusing on the users whose compromise would be both most likely and most damaging.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• When should organisations prioritise targeted coaching over broad security awareness training?
• When should organisations prioritise compliance-driven security training over generic awareness content?
• How should security teams prioritise NHI remediation in cloud environments?
• Should organisations prioritise external exposure or internal credential governance first?