Glossary

Hands-On Cybersecurity Training

Cyber threats are constantly evolving, but one thing never changes: effective cybersecurity still depends on people. While technology can detect and deflect many attacks, human error remains a top vulnerability—and a top target for threat actors.

That’s why cybersecurity with hands-on training is essential. It equips employees and professionals alike with practical skills, real-world experience, and the confidence to respond when it matters most.

What is Hands-on Training?

Hands-on training, also known as experiential learning, is a form of immersive, practical education that prioritizes interactivity over passive absorption. Cybersecurity training labs allow people to develop and apply practical skills alongside foundational knowledge. Some examples include: 

• Learning how to use threat intelligence tools by assessing virtualized IT infrastructure
• Responding to simulated cyberattacks
• Participating in ethical hacking challenges to learn about vulnerability management
• Conducting simulated penetration tests
• Running competitive simulations such as capture-the-flag

Key Components of Hands-On Cybersecurity Education

Experiential learning is widely regarded as an essential component of effective cybersecurity training in both academic and professional settings. It allows participants to gain an understanding of cybersecurity operations and decision-making that they simply wouldn’t be able to get in a traditional classroom. 

Hands-on security training typically encompasses one or more of the following: 

• Simulated IT environments where learners can practice without impacting production systems
• Exercises that require practical application of concepts and skills, such as intrusion detection, vulnerability remediation, and disaster recovery
• The option to engage through either self-paced or instructor-led progression

Why is Practical Cybersecurity Training So Important?

Cybersecurity training for employees teaches them how to recognize and respond not just to attacks against your organization, but also to tactics that threat actors might use to target them. For cybersecurity professionals, it teaches them how to use their security toolkit to fend off cyberattacks. 

However, in both cases, there’s only so much you can learn in a classroom.

Knowing how to recognize a particular attack vector and understanding how to respond to an incident as it happens require two very different skillsets. You might know how a phishing attack happens on paper, but that’s different from learning how to recognize the warning signs in the wild. 

And cybersecurity is one area where you can’t really afford to make a mistake. 

To put it another way, you have to stave off every single cyberattack, whereas a threat actor only has to succeed once. Hands-on training greatly improves your chances of doing so by bridging the gap between concept and execution.

Rather than expecting your people to apply passive knowledge for the first time during an attack, it’s better for them to “learn by doing” beforehand. 

This is where virtual labs come into play. 

The Benefits of Virtual Labs for Cybersecurity Training

Real-world cyber training is limited in scope by necessity. You can’t exactly release ransomware into your ecosystem for the purposes of education. But what you can do is rely on a simulated environment, walled off from your real ecosystem, to protect critical systems and infrastructure.

If your trainees fail to contain the threat, all you need to do is shut down the sandbox.

This essentially means you’ve got on-demand access to realistic simulations of nearly every cyberattack your organization is likely to face, allowing you to: 

• Enable your people to develop the skills and confidence to respond to actual threats.
• Create a more effective cybersecurity awareness program. 
• Provide trainees with the autonomy to experiment with and test new systems and tools.
• Support continuous improvement by regularly updating simulations to reflect the newest tactics, techniques, and procedures.
• Scale your training to any number of participants without sacrificing quality.
• Reduce the overhead of your training initiative, eliminating the need for physical classrooms.
• Improve accessibility through self-paced training.