In many organizations, the idea almost automatically forms that security is a technical domain. That it is about firewalls, encryption, password policies, and systems — and therefore mainly about IT. Employees see it as something outside of them. Something others will solve. And honestly: we as security professionals have reinforced that image for years. Campaigns were filled with technical terms, policies were written in expert language, and examples were often so abstract that employees felt they had stepped onto unfamiliar ground. If you ask around who security belongs to, you will almost always get the same answer: “IT takes care of that, right?”
“Security feels technical—until you show it happens every day in your own pocket.”
But that misses the point. Because most risks don’t originate in systems — they originate in behavior. In choices. In employees’ daily routines. Security is not a technical topic; it is human. And as long as employees don’t feel that, awareness will keep trying to move in a field that doesn’t seem to belong to them.
People don’t learn from technology—they learn from recognition
When security is presented as technology, something predictable happens: employees disengage. Not because they don’t want to contribute, but because they don’t recognize themselves in the examples. A scenario about a zero-day exploit means little to most people. An explanation about hashes and tokens even less. It doesn’t land. It slides away. And so the topic continues to exist in a parallel universe: important, but not mine.
Awareness only works when you connect it to human experiences—situations employees recognize, ideally from their own lives. That is where the real connection is. When you explain how someone was approached on WhatsApp by a “family member,” or how a colleague almost paid for a parcel that was never ordered, you immediately see a different kind of attention. People nod. Sometimes laugh. Share their own story. And suddenly security shifts from a technical question to a human situation.
Those are exactly the moments when awareness begins.
Security becomes everyone’s once employees recognize themselves in it
The turning point in organizations doesn’t come from more policy or technical presentations, but from examples so relatable that employees think: “That could have happened to me.” When you connect security to personal behavior—passwords, phones, apps, parcels, everyday social engineering—recognition appears. And recognition is the engine of behavior change.
From that moment on, responsibility shifts: security is no longer something IT “handles,” but something employees themselves can recognize, understand, and influence. That is when the core of awareness emerges: change that grows from within. Not because it is required, but because it makes sense.
When people see themselves in the examples, they also start to see themselves in the solution.