Privacy training programs often focus on restrictions and rules. This approach creates frustrated employees who see privacy requirements as obstacles rather than protections. A different strategy produces better results.
Laying the Groundwork
Start by understanding what your teams want to accomplish. Ask marketing about their campaign goals. Learn how support measures success. Watch how developers build features. Privacy training succeeds when it starts with your teams’ actual work, not a single ideal process designed by outsiders.
Consider a common marketing scenario: Your team needs to segment subscribers for targeted campaigns. They want purchase history, email engagement data, and location information. Rather than saying “you can’t export all that data,” teach them to start with their goals. In training, walk through real examples: “What are we trying to achieve with this campaign? What signals actually tell us who to target?”
A team might say they need complete purchase histories, but their goal is finding high-value customers in specific regions who engage with product announcements. This becomes a teaching moment. Show them how to build effective segments using aggregated data. Practice creating filtered views that provide targeting power without exposing raw data. When teams learn to map their goals to privacy-preserving solutions, they stop seeing privacy as a barrier.
Match Training to Roles
Different teams need different training.1 Your support team lives in customer data all day. Your content team rarely touches it. Your developers build systems that process it. Each role needs training that matches their actual work.
Marketing teams need to understand how to handle subscriber data. Development teams need privacy-by-design principles. Support teams need guidance on secure data sharing. Build your training for each team around the decisions that each makes daily. Nothing is more boring to employees than taking training that spends most of its time discussing someone else’s processes.
Build Privacy Into Workflows
Privacy training works best when it connects to actual tasks. When marketing plans a new campaign, include privacy review in the planning template. When support creates a new ticket category, add data handling guidelines to the setup process. When developing a new feature, make privacy assessment part of the kickoff checklist. Take the time to explain how and why privacy-related decisions are made rather than dictating “the way things are going to be.” This means that training isn’t something that you do once a year and then forget about until the following year but something that is constantly refreshed, refined, and applied.
Keep Knowledge Fresh
Monthly tips work better than annual training sessions. Share quick guides based on recent projects. Recognize teams that find innovative privacy solutions. Use your company channels – newsletters, chat tools, team meetings – to keep privacy visible without being intrusive.
That doesn’t mean that annual training has no place. Many companies have training requirements for vendors that require documentation and certification. But, if you want your program to be truly effective, you won’t limit things to the annual session but find as many teachable moments throughout the year as you can.
Make It Personal
Connect work privacy to personal privacy. Your teams people already protect their information. They are thinking about privacy at a personal level. They create strong passwords, guard their identity, and think carefully about sharing personal details. Build on those instincts. For privacy issues, have them consider individual users or recipients rather than “segments” and “lists.” Show how customer concerns mirror their privacy preferences.
What Success Looks Like
Effective privacy training changes behavior. You want teams that spot privacy questions early and build privacy into their plans from the beginning rather than something that only gets thought about right before a product ships or a marketing campaign goes out the door. Most importantly, you want people to see the privacy team as a resource for achieving their goals rather than a barrier to progress.
So, what does success look like? It looks like teams who ask questions. It looks like teams with members who start thinking about how they would react on learning that some other company is using their data in the same ways that they are considering.
Footnotes
- Jodi Daniels, How to Implement Effective Privacy Training, IAPP (2025), https://iapp.org/news/a/how-to-implement-effective-privacy-training (last visited Feb 12, 2025). ↩︎
