Employee calls out company's redundant response to phishing emails and they make a valid point

Understanding the minor technicalities of existing systems and getting trained for the same at a workplace is necessary. But what can one do when the training becomes overbearing more than necessary? One employee, u/extracloroxbleach, took to Reddit to share a story of how they were forced to take phishing training at their workplace every time they reported such emails.

"Each department has its own shared email with more than a dozen people in it. When I started working here, I wondered why we get over 100 spam and phishing emails every day," the employee wrote. However, the employee soon discovered why they had so many of these emails when they reported them. "The next day, I got an email from headquarters that forced me to take this phishing training that takes 15 min. Training tells me to report it every time I get phishing emails." But it didn't end there. "I thought it was a one-time done thing. Nope. I reported again and I had to do the exact training again," the individual revealed. "So now I know why we have hundreds of s*** emails. Because nobody wants to report them."

People in the comments came up with interesting solutions to deal with the problem. u/demon_fae suggested, "If it's a video training, it's actually less terrible. Switch the headphones over to an audiobook or something and just glance at the screen periodically to advance the training or start it over. All-text but timed trainings are the worst. Also, realistically, if the person reports the whole batch, every single one, their training will probably get waived after the first day of it. I suspect that submitting the bug report for the system sending you to training for every email is just more annoying than ignoring the emails."

u/xelle24 shared, "My company also requires once-a-year training and IT Security sends out occasional fake phishing emails (which are usually painfully obvious if you're at all familiar with popular 80s/90s films and actors... my favorite was an email from 'Linda Hamilton' and the one after it from 'John Connor,' but there are plenty of other clues to tell you it's a phishing expedition). Unfortunately, if too many people fall for the fake emails, we all have to take the training again. Last year, we did the training module three times over the course of the year."

u/StructureBetter2101 wrote, "My coworkers think it's hilarious when someone asks about a potential phishing email. They convince the person to click the link and fail. I just keep my mouth shut because most of my coworkers are older than dirt." u/R_V_Z remarked, "I once got an award for reporting phishing emails. To claim it, I had to click a link that led to outside the company. I did some research and it was a legit link, so the reward for not clicking external unprompted links is to click an external unprompted link." u/Ok-Leader9304 pointed out, "The IT team has to do work when you report the emails. They don't want to do the work. So they punish anyone who makes a report. You could pose the question to the head of IT. They might not be aware."