Has your organization provided phishing training for employees? With the mounting number of cybersecurity threats testing the protective walls around your business, awareness training for employees is an absolute must in 2025.
Airports are being shut down, telecom services are being interrupted, and in every other sphere as well, cybersecurity threats continue to grow. In 2025, we have witnessed a marked rise in HR-based phishing threats that try to trick employees into opening up their systems to malware and other more nefarious risks.
While cybersecurity training isn’t strictly an HR responsibility, with the number of threats that put both the employees and your business at risk, ignoring this aspect of training can be very dangerous in the long run. Especially when cursory online training is easily ignored, it falls to HR to ensure the learning is not ignored. Between sessions of AI tutoring and general upskilling, it’s time to slip in phishing training for employees, both old and new.
Arranging phishing training for employees and ensuring engagement and participation is an HR responsibility that often gets ignored. (Image: Freepik)
Phishing Training for Employees Could Save Your Business a Pretty Penny
Phishing attacks are on the rise, and they no longer look like the obvious scams we’ve learnt to avoid since the early days of the internet. These social engineering tactics rely on human errors and distractions to mislead unsuspecting parties into clicking on links or responding to interactions that expose the system to the real threats that lie behind them. These exploitative measures look innocent at first glance, but their strength lies in this very feature, disguising the real threat with a harmless facade.
On an individual level, many have their identity, data, or money stolen via these phishing scams. On an organizational level, every employee, executive, customer, and client associated with the business is affected when a cybersecurity threat is allowed in. While security hacks and exploitation of system vulnerabilities are commonly perceived as the biggest threats to an organization, Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report found that phishing attacks and pretexting via email caused 73% of social engineering breaches.
With such risks constantly looming, awareness training for employees could be the factor that keeps your business well away from such security risks.
Employee Phishing Threat Training Is Essential, Not Optional
Earlier this year, Keepnet’s 2025 New Hires Phishing Susceptibility Report found that 71% of new hires fall for phishing attempts due to their lack of experience and security training during the onboarding process. These new hires are also 44% more likely to fall for phishing scams compared to long-term employees.
This shows that with time, experience, and training, there is a decline in their vulnerability to such threats. The report also confirmed as much, recording a 30% drop in risk with targeted training to help them better understand the threats that surround them.
Is Phishing Training Ineffective? There Is Data to Suggest That Improvements Are Needed
Phishing training for employees is a stellar idea for any business and HR team to invest in; however, as the threats are evolving, the mode of training also needs to evolve to keep up. A study conducted by University of California, San Diego researchers found that when training is merely provided online, about 75% of employees engage with it for a minute or less, and a third of them leave the training without interacting with the embedded content or training material.
The experiment found that there was no significant difference in employees falling for such phishing emails, whether they received the mandatory training or not. The study also found that as more time passed, employees were found to be more likely to fall for such emails, suggesting they grew complacent and let down their guard.
Combine Employee Phishing Training with Other Cybersecurity Measures
While the data could lead some to believe that phishing threat training for employees was not worth the effort, we might instead consider that the nature and frequency of training require a closer look. Instead of solely relying on other cybersecurity measures or on employees to know better, it is essential to take both into account and create a holistic system of security.
The value of providing employee phishing guidance may not be felt unless there is an attack of some sort, but waiting for them to fall prey to such threats only hurts the business overall. Ultimately, the content of this phishing training for employees may rely on experts and IT professionals, but the task of arranging these training in a way that employees can actually learn from falls to HR.
Cybercriminals are increasingly exploiting HR-related topics—such as performance reviews, payroll updates, and training notifications—to craft convincing phishing emails.