Empowering
individual
learning
At a glance
Bishop Fox, a cybersecurity consulting firm, finds critical vulnerabilities before hackers can. We collaborated to develop learning programs nurturing the training and development of over 200 Bishop Fox employees. Now, Bishop Fox offers individual learning pathways, ensuring all teammates are empowered to succeed.
What we did
Curriculum development
Assessment design
Video production
Instructional design
Train-the-trainer
Framework development
Competency modeling
System implementation
Change management
Preparing the next generation of consultants
The average data breach costs $9.4M, so companies go to great lengths to prevent them. Yet, even organizations with robust internal security teams occasionally overlook vulnerabilities. That’s why more than a quarter of Fortune 100 companies turn to Bishop Fox, a cybersecurity consulting firm, to find weaknesses before hackers can.
Qualified cybersecurity professionals are increasingly difficult to find and expensive to employ. As the workforce gap widens, many organizations are left wondering who will prepare the next generation of security professionals. In 2020, Bishop Fox’s leaders began designing their own training programs to address this issue. They hoped the programs would attract a steady supply of talent, enable efficient onboarding, and reinforce the firm’s reputation for thought leadership.
Prior to working with Elevos, Bishop Fox had purchased an off-the-shelf content library to fill foundational training needs and had created a robust internal knowledge base to document its unique practices and procedures. Bishop Fox had also adopted 360Learning, a modern learning management system popular among organizations looking to upskill their workforces from within.
“The idea was to take all the knowledge that our consultants have and make it more accessible,” said Bishop Fox general manager Andrew Wilson. “As the company has grown, we’ve had to address training at scale.”
However, Bishop Fox didn’t have a unified approach to training. Every manager had a different way of identifying skill gaps, developing curricula, assembling materials, enabling trainers, and tracking progress. Leaders wanted a consistent approach with reliable quality controls that would cement Bishop Fox’s reputation as a hub for world-class talent.
Bishop Fox hired Elevos to lead the development of its flagship training program: Bishop Fox Academy. The team’s shared objective was to efficiently prepare new hires to deliver quality consulting services using a flexible curriculum.
Envisioning flexible paths
Our team set out to learn about Bishop Fox’s priorities. We hosted workshops with dozens of practice directors and subject matter experts to identify 32 core skills and 128 technical skills that most heavily dictate the success of employees.
“Cybersecurity consulting requires a special blend of skills that are hard to find,” said Elevos director Jake Prince. “We used a skills-based approach to ensure that Bishop Fox can reliably prepare capable consultants to meet the growing demands of its clients.”
For 42 roles among seven service lines within Bishop Fox, we established target skill levels, such as beginner, intermediate, or advanced. By drawing from a singular skill model to define expectations for all roles, we broke down silos between groups, made professional development more transparent, and enabled a modular curriculum.
Using the new skill model, Bishop Fox managers assessed the skill levels of their staff. We performed a gap analysis between the current skill levels of employees and their role-based targets, identifying major gaps with the most potential for improvement.
We outlined which skills are tied to services and performance expectations. For any given service, we know the target skill set.”
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Andrew Wilson
Vice President & General Manager at Bishop Fox
Designing impactful experiences
Bishop Fox wanted to leverage existing training content, including internal documentation and third-party resources. We established program objectives aligned to employee responsibilities. Using these objectives, we analyzed existing internal and external materials, selected the most relevant, and identified gaps that we would address by creating new content.
We instituted content development standards, coached Bishop Fox experts in instructional design practices, and led the development of 37 custom courses. We grouped the courses into a dozen paths, each of which included video introductions, skill development courses, role-playing games, and scenario-based evaluations. We took care to balance self- and instructor-led components, ensuring that new hires would get adequate support without creating burdensome work for managers. After testing the paths with pilot groups and teaching leaders to administer them, we rolled them out to over 200 learners throughout Bishop Fox.
By further developing the best talent in the industry, we will continue to define the future of offensive security”
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Vinnie Liu
CEO at Bishop Fox
A culture of empowerment
By offering flexible learning paths, Bishop Fox Academy empowers leaders to articulate expectations, managers to generate personalized training plans, and staff to take ownership of their development. By allowing training to be completed in parallel with working, Bishop Fox Academy minimizes the downtime before new consultants can begin making valuable contributions to their teams.
After Bishop Fox implemented the new learning paths, its employees increased their engagement with the 360Learning system by 50%. The number of content authors doubled, paving the way for more internal experts to share their knowledge and skills with teammates. Finally, the new paths cut the workload to deliver new hire training in half, ensuring consistent quality while freeing up time for busy managers.
Learn more about this project on Bishop Fox’s blog.