Privacy Awareness and Training

As a privacy professional, there’s only so much you can do to ensure personal information is protected on your own. Because personal data is processed across an organization, an effective privacy program encourages collaboration with various other departments. This ensures that data custodians with more knowledge of intricate processes or systems than you do can be privacy champions.

To accomplish this, privacy professionals need to spread awareness and conduct training to educate employees and stakeholders about the importance of privacy, how to handle personal data in accordance with legal and regulatory requirements, and what specific actions to take to streamline privacy risk management.

Less Mature

At its most immature level, there is no privacy awareness or training taking place at your organization, or it may only be offered retroactively after privacy breaches or incidents. In contrast, mature privacy awareness and training practices are conducted regularly and are measured and improved over time. You’ll test colleagues to evaluate the efficacy of the training, report on results, and identify gaps in both the organization’s knowledge of privacy-related topics as well as the training materials.

More Mature

Privacy professionals should keep in mind the importance of tailoring training and education for 
different roles and levels of the organization as well as the need to address emerging privacy issues and technologies. Because privacy is an evolving space, you’ll want to update your training over time.

Recommended Next Steps

To mature your privacy awareness and training practices, take the following steps: 

1. Develop a comprehensive privacy training program. This should be customized for your organization. Some starting points will be to:

• Understand your organization’s geographical footprint so you can determine what laws, regulations, customs, and cultural norms may be applicable.
• Establish a privacy committee or governance council so you can embed champions to act on your privacy program’s initiatives and gather feedback on how to successfully operationalize your program.
• Determine what compliance requirements need to be operationalized and aligned with processes such as performing privacy impact assessments and fulfilling subject rights requests.
• Create a training program so that your colleagues and co-workers understand their obligations and try to create a privacy-first culture. This should also be rolled out to new hires as they join your organization.
• Share and present your organization’s privacy policies and try to relate policy elements to different stakeholders’ roles and responsibilities.
• Report on KPIs, metrics, training outcomes, and risks to senior leaders so that they have oversight of the program and insight into training needs.

2. Design a process to ensure consistent rollout to all employees (including new hires) and contractors, consultants, or other workers with access to data and/or company systems.

3. Tailor training to specific job roles.

4. Explore different training methods to address your organization’s unique education needs.

5. Identify the best means of delivering training within your budget, such as e-learning modules or recorded trainings, in-person training sessions, and simulations.

6. Find ways to make privacy training fun and engaging. You could develop interactive quizzes, host games with prizes, create a shared playlist, send out a newsletter, or anything else that educates your colleagues on the importance of privacy while keeping them engaged.