Advantages and Disadvantages of Custom Courses

Whether you’re seeking educational opportunities for yourself or exploring training for colleagues and employees, at some point you will likely come up against a decision: are your training needs best met by an open course or a bespoke training?

Here is a look at the advantages and disadvantages of custom courses.

Advantages of Custom Courses

More focused training

Running a custom training course for a single client usually allows the training to be a lot more focused on the specific subjects and skills that are relevant to your business. With a bespoke training, most aspects are customizable. Public courses are often generic because they address businesses of any sector or size that attend them.

Work-related examples

An in-house training means the course can be designed and refined to address your specific needs and issues, using real-life examples and therefore have the highest impact. Your colleagues will be able to work on current work or examples of work which relates to their roles, not on generic examples.

Training cost savings

For a custom training, the cost per participant is typically lower than public courses due to the fact the training company only has to send a trainer to your HQ rather than set up an entire training environment themselves somewhere else, and you could have significantly more people attend it. Therefore, reasonable cost savings can be achieved.

Travel cost savings

In addition to the training cost savings, having a custom in-house training saves you the trouble of paying for the travel and possible accommodation to get all your colleagues to the training.

Disadvantages of Custom Courses

Extra administration

Although you save money by lessening the logistics needed by the training company, you do take on this burden yourself. Requirements of in-house bespoke courses could include a training room, providing access to the trainer in the building, equipment such as projectors, laptops and tablets among other things. These need to be sorted out and in advance to ensure that everything works before the training begins.

Trainees stay onsite

As much as this is a benefit, it is also a disadvantage to do an in-house bespoke training. The pure fact the candidates could be pulled out of the training in order to help with other day-to-day activities or emergencies suggests they probably will be. This makes it hard to actually get a candidate through an entire session without interruption.

Lack of networking

If the custom training happens in the same environment where your colleagues work, there is the chance the training to go stale. They will not meet anyone new, so they will be missing out on an excellent networking opportunity, as well as the fact different ethos’ and styles brought by employees from other companies, things which can provide a different perspective to your colleagues.

Before you go

Read our similar guide on the Advantages and Disadvantages of Public Courses for more information. Hopefully, by reading them both, you can make an easier decision on what suits best your company’s training needs.