At Secure Practice, we’ve gained extensive experience through "Hele Norge Øver" and from facilitating exercises on our platform. Now, we’re excited to share our top tips and best practices to help you achieve success with PrepJam Exercises on your own!
It’s all about the “whole experience”!
Facilitating exercises are more than just passing slides on a screen in front of a group of people, it is more like a show.
Besides learning and practicing their cyber security skills, participants expects to be entertained and engaged as well. Exercises are also a social event, so you might want to make sure they have the opportunity to interact with each other from time to time.
Take the participants through a memorable experience
We have collected some of our facilitators best tips for an engaging session:
Engage the audience through dialogue: Avoid long monologues as they can cause the audience to lose interest. Dare to ask open questions to the room.
Collaborate with co-facilitators: We recommend having a co-facilitator to make the interaction more like a conversation. This helps keeping the session dynamic and natural.
Interact with participants: Let the participants discuss in groups or with the person they are sitting next to. Walk around and talk with the participants during discussions. Bring some of their insights back to the stage.
Use humor: Even though cybersecurity is serious business, humor is almost always a winner and helps keep the atmosphere light and engaging.
Tell stories from reality: Share your experiences with cyberattacks or use examples from well-known incidents so that people can relate and learn from.
Review survey and decision responses: Spend time going through the survey and decision responses to address any concerns or feedback. Take some time to discuss some of them in plenary as well. This also gives the participants an opportunity to learn from each other.
Have an assistant: If you are running a larger exercise, an assistant or a co-facilitator might come in handy as they can help with tasks like passing the microphone and noting raised hands.
Know your audience: Avoid heavy use of technical jargon and details if the audience have varying levels of prior knowledge about cybersecurity. And if you are running a exercise internal in a organization, it might be wise to know their organizational jargon and culture as well.
Maintain engagement: Did you know that the average attention span for an adult is only 8 seconds, and that we tend to loose our focus after only 20-45 minutes? Maintain engagement by using a variety of activities in the exercise, such as decisions and surveys, media and interactive actions.
Be aware of attention thieves: In today’s digital age, we often find ourselves competing for attention with mobile phones. This challenge extends to exercises, where participants sometimes browse the internet on their phones between activities. To minimize distractions, it’s important to keep them engaged throughout.
Conclusion
Facilitating cybersecurity exercises is not just about delivering content, but also about ensuring that participants are entertained, engaged, and able to interact with each other. By incorporating dialogue, collaboration, humor, real-life stories, and varied activities, you can maintain the audience's attention and make the session memorable. Understanding the audience and minimizing distractions are also key to a successful exercise.
Ultimately, the goal is to provide a learning experience that participants will find both enjoyable and educational!