WWW Security Training courses

If you aren’t careful, the costs of developer security training can quickly snowball. As well as the sticker price of security training, it’s essential to factor in the additional opportunity costs associated with training.

These costs can vary hugely between classroom-style training, and eLearning courses – and to maximise your security training investment, it’s crucial to understand the real costs of developer security training.

Comparing Course Prices

Instructor-led courses typically take place over several days, in a classroom-style location, and cover a pre-determined course syllabus. Whilst this rigid model can ensure a good grounding in basic security principles, it fails to offer any degree of specialisation to suit your developers’ roles. With the additional overhead that comes with classroom training, these courses are usually markedly more expensive than eLearning courses – an additional cost which is worsened by the inclusion of potentially irrelevant topics.

In contrast, eLearning typically uses a modular format, combining a handful of core modules with a wider selection of topical add-ons. These additional modules can be paid for on a case-by-case basis, ensuring that your organisation only pays for training that’s relevant to the developers taking it. This extra flexibility usually results in a lower cost, and greater relevance, than classroom-style training.

The Opportunity Costs of Classroom Training

Developers are highly skilled, and their time is a hugely valuable commodity. Any activity that takes developers away from the development environment will bring with it a very real set of opportunity costs, greater than the costs of their salary alone. This trade-off can make it very hard to justify security training, so it’s essential that training minimises the time developers are forced to take away from work.

Classroom courses will often last two or three days, during which time developers will be completely detached from project work. In order to make courses as cost-effective as possible, it’s often necessary to enroll several developers at any one time. If you’re looking to enroll even half of your developers in a security course, this can quickly decimate your development team, and bring their current project to a standstill.