Security Awareness Proficiency Assessment (SAPA)

You can assign a Security Awareness Proficiency Assessment to your users to assess their security awareness knowledge. The assessment results provide you with an overview of your organization's strengths and weaknesses. You can use this information to create targeted phishing and training campaigns that fit your users' needs.

We developed the assessment questions from four research studies. To ensure the quality of these questions, we've performed both external and internal validations. For more information about how we developed these questions, please see our KnowBe4 Security Awareness Proficiency Assessment technical document.

In this article, you'll learn how to use SAPA and review your organization's assessment results. For specific information about assessments, see our How to Use Assessments article.

Jump to:
Best Practices for Implementation
Completing Assessments in the Learner Experience
Monitoring Your SAPA Campaign
SAPA Results

Best Practices for Implementation

We recommend that you assign your first assessment after your first phishing test, but before your first training campaign. You can use the scores from your first assessment as a baseline to see how your organization's strengths and weaknesses change over time.

After your first assessment, you should continue to assess your users at least once per year, but no more than twice per year. We recommend that you give your users time to learn from their new training assignments before you assign another assessment. 

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Completing Assessments in the Learner Experience

To complete an assessment, your users will log in to their Learner Experience (LX) and click the Training tab. Then, they'll locate the assessment that they've been assigned and click Start Assessment.

After they click Start, users have the option to either start the assessment or complete the assessment later. If the user clicks Start Assessment, they must answer all questions as the user won't be able to stop in the middle of the assessment and return to it later. If the user does not have time to take the assessment immediately, we recommend they click Come Back Later when they have time to take the full assessment.

Each assessment includes 23 questions. These questions are randomly selected from a list of 63 questions. We randomly select these questions to ensure that each users' assessment is unique and that users won't be able to share answers with their coworkers. Sharing answers can result in inaccurate reporting. 

Users must answer all questions to complete the assessment. After users complete the assessment, they will be directed to a thank you page.

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Monitoring Your SAPA Campaign

After you assign an assessment to your users, you can view your users' progress. To view your users' progress, follow the steps below:

1. Log in to your KnowBe4 account and navigate to Training > Campaigns.
2. On the Campaigns subtab, click the name of the campaign in which the assessment was assigned.
3. On the Campaign Overview page, find the assessment and click User Progress under the assessment title.

From the User Progress page, you can see information about your users' progress including their assessment scores, if they've started their assessment, and how much time they've spent on the assessment. See below for more information about the User Progress page:

1. Download CSV: Click this button to download a CSV file of the information displayed in the table below.
2. Score: Displays the user's assessment score.
3. Actions: Click this drop-down menu to select the action you'd like to perform on the selected user or users. Options include:
   • Send Notification: Send a manual notification to the user about their assessment.
   • Mark as Completed: Manually mark the user's assessment as complete.
   • Reset Progress: Allow the user to restart the assessment.

For more information about managing your users' progress, see our User Training Progress article.

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SAPA Results

Once your users have completed their assessment, you can review the results of the assessment campaign. On the Assessment Results page, you can view your organization’s average assessment score for all users. To view your organization's results, follow the steps below:

1. Log in to your KnowBe4 account and navigate to Training > Campaigns.
2. On the Campaigns subtab, click the name of the campaign in which the assessment was assigned.
3. On the Campaign Overview page, find the assessment and click Assessment Results under the assessment's title. Click here to view an example of the results on the Assessment Results page.

The first graph on this page shows the average assessment score for all your users. The second graph shows the average assessment score for each knowledge area.

The seven knowledge areas are:

• Email Security
• Incident Reporting
• Internet Use
• Mobile Devices
• Passwords & Authentication
• Security Awareness
• Social Media

You can find an explanation of each knowledge area below the graphs.

If you click a knowledge area, you will be directed to content in the ModStore that relates to that area. You can then use these content suggestions to assign content to your users to improve their understanding of specific knowledge areas. For example, if your users have a low score for the Mobile Devices knowledge area, your users may need more training content about how to stay safe on mobile devices.

If you have a Platinum or Diamond subscription, you use Smart Groups to automatically enroll users into training campaigns based on their assessment results. For more information about automated campaigns, see our Automation with Smart Groups - Assessment Results article.

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