When Standard Courses Work and When Your Team Needs a Bespoke Solution

If you’re short on time, you can read a quick summary below.

LEADERSHIP & INFLUENCELEARNING & DEVELOPMENT

Neal Greenspan

7/1/20266 min read

When Standard Courses Work and When Your Team Needs a Bespoke Solution

If you’re short on time…

Open training courses work well when individual employees need specific, standardized technical skills or compliance updates.
Consultant-led solutions become necessary when the challenge isn't a lack of information, but a gap in behavior, strategic alignment, or organizational context.
The hidden risk of sending teams to generic workshops for complex problems is "training splash": initial enthusiasm followed by a quick return to old habits.
Choosing the right path requires diagnosing whether you need to transfer knowledge or transform how your people actually communicate and execute work together.

Full article

Every year, HR directors and Learning & Development leaders face a familiar balancing act. You have a professional development budget to spend, a list of skill gaps to close, and a sea of options claiming to fix both.

Studies published in the Journal of Applied Psychology demonstrate that employees actually apply only 15% of what they learn in traditional training to their job functions. (Link)

When a team or individual needs to sharpen a skill, the decision usually comes down to two paths: send them to an open-enrollment training course or bring in an external training consultant to build a tailored solution.

On paper, open training often looks like the path of least resistance. It is easy to schedule, easy to budget per seat, and covers clear subjects. Yet, after spending decades working with organizations, observing team dynamics, and coaching leaders through critical high-stakes moments, I have noticed a recurring pattern.

Companies often select open training courses for problems that require deep, contextual intervention, and then wonder why long-term behavior never actually changes.

The goal isn't to declare one option superior to the other. Both have a distinct role in organizational growth. However, getting the maximum return on your development budget requires understanding why a problem exists before deciding how to deliver the solution.

Understanding Open Training: When Standard Knowledge is Enough

Open-enrollment courses, where individuals from various organizations attend a standardized class, are designed around broad applicability. They teach established frameworks, regulatory updates, or specific technical tools.

In my experience, open training is the ideal choice when the primary objective is straightforward knowledge acquisition or baseline skill updates.

When open training makes sense:

Standardized technical skills: If a manager needs to learn a specific software tool, a financial modeling framework, or updated compliance regulations, a standard open course delivers exact parameters without needing customization.
Individual baseline upgrades: When single employees want to broaden their exposure, learn common industry terminology, or refresh foundational concepts alongside peers from other companies.
Budget-constrained exploration: If only one or two people need exposure to a subject, paying per seat in an open workshop is far more practical than commissioning a dedicated project.

The limitation of open training isn't the quality of the instructor; it is the absence of context. An open course cannot account for your company's culture, internal politics, market position, or team dynamics. It teaches what to do in a vacuum, leaving the employee with the difficult job of figuring out how to adapt it to their actual workday.

The Hidden Cost of the "Off-the-Shelf" Approach

What happens when an organization sends an entire team to a generic workshop to resolve a deeper systemic issue, such as poor cross-departmental communication, weak strategic alignment, or ineffective pitch execution?

Usually, you experience what I call the "training splash."

Participants return to the office on Monday morning energized by new concepts. But within two weeks, reality sets in. The generalized examples from the seminar don't fit the actual friction points of their current projects. Without post-training accountability or alignment with existing leadership expectations, the old habits quietly take over again.

A client of mine approached me and relayed a story where they sent two of their project managers to a course on “Influential Communication.” A large part of their job was to convince other groups to provide resources for projects they were managing. While there were some valuable skills they learned, they realized that most of the lessons, tools, tips, and tricks they were given had no relevance in their organization.

The client contacted me, and we created a 2-day program based on what their needs were and which problems they needed help solving. All eleven of their project managers participated, and while the cost was higher than the cost of the open training for the first two, it was less than half what it would have cost them to send all eleven to the open training that proved mostly useless. The resulting score of 4.7/5 to the question “the course gave me tools I can use in my day-to-day work” was all the proof they needed that the investment was worth it.

When leadership challenges or communication breakdowns occur, the issue is rarely that intelligent professionals lack basic information. The real issue is almost always context, alignment, and execution.

Working with a Training Consultant: Designing for Impact

Bringing in an experienced training consultant is not just about getting a customized PowerPoint presentation. It is about bringing in a fresh perspective to diagnose why a specific struggle persists, challenge structural assumptions, and build a tailored framework around your team's real challenges.

Rather than delivering a generic syllabus, a consultant operates as a temporary advisor who studies your environment before suggesting a path forward.

When a consultant-led approach is essential:

1. The stakes are exceptionally high

When your organization is preparing for critical shifts, launching strategic initiatives, struggling with communications challenges, navigating major change management, or pitching high-value opportunities, generic advice is not enough. You need coaching and frameworks that directly address the specific project and issues at hand.

2. The challenge is structural or relational, not instructional

If a department struggles with strategic clarity, executive presence, or pitching ideas internally, an open lecture won't solve it. A consultant looks at how your team currently interacts, pinpoints where assumptions fall short, and helps realign how people communicate together.

3. You require genuine behavioral change, not just awareness

True skill mastery comes from practicing on actual work, receiving direct feedback, and building practical systems that stick long after the session ends. A bespoke program uses real scenarios from your workplace, allowing teams to solve actual business problems while developing the skill.

How to Decide: A Simple Framework for L&D Leaders

Before allocating your next development budget, ask yourself these three diagnostic questions:

1. Is this a broad skill gap or an execution challenge?

If an employee needs to learn how to use a specific platform or understand a new regulation, choose open training. If the team knows what they should be doing but continuously struggles to carry it out effectively in their actual environment, bring in a consultant.

2. Does the solution require our real-world context to work?

If the learning material can be applied identically at a bank, a software firm, or a manufacturing company, open training is fine. If the outcome depends heavily on your industry positioning, messaging strategy, or internal dynamics, it demands a tailored solution.

3. What is the cost of non-implementation?

If a team member attends a course and only retains 20% of the material, does it harm the business? If the answer is no, open training is low risk. If failing to change behavior directly impacts your revenue, team retention, or strategic clarity, a generic approach is an expensive risk.

The Budget

Budgets are important. Any good consultant knows this. Many people get sent to open training because on the surface, they appear less expensive. And sometimes this is true. However, often, when several people need to be trained, bringing in a training consultant not only saves money when comparing the price times the participants of open training, but the solution provides more impactful and long-lasting results and gives you far more value for your budget.

Moving Forward

Development budgets are finite, but more importantly, your team's time and attention are finite.

Open training courses will always have their place for foundational learning and individual updates. But when your organization faces complex communication challenges, strategic shifts, or high-stakes goals, off-the-shelf solutions rarely move the needle. Real progress happens when training meets your people exactly where they are, building capabilities directly into the real work they perform every day.

If you are currently evaluating your team’s development needs and aren't sure whether an open course or a customized consultative approach makes the most sense for your situation, I would be happy to have a conversation and help you think it through.

And no, my answer will not always be “hire the consultant.”