Why Catalog Courses Waste Half Your Training Budget

Here is an uncomfortable exercise for anyone who owns an IT training budget. Take the agenda of the last five-day course your team attended and highlight the topics they have applied at work since. For most teams, honest highlighting covers 30–50% of the agenda. The other half was paid for twice: once in course fees, and once in a week of engineer salaries spent sitting through it.

This is not an argument against training — it is an argument against buying training the way most companies do. Let’s take the waste apart and look at what actually drives it.

Where the other half goes

Catalog courses are built for everyone, so they fit no one. A vendor curriculum must serve a bank in Frankfurt, an MSP in Dubai and a university in Auckland with the same table of contents. That means every fundamental is re-taught, every feature is covered including the ones your architecture will never use, and the pacing assumes the least-experienced plausible attendee. None of this is a flaw in the course — it is the nature of a catalog product.

Teams pay for fundamentals they already have. The typical enterprise attendee has years of adjacent experience. Yet a fixed agenda cannot skip day one, so your senior engineers relearn subnetting or VM snapshots while their tickets pile up. Multiply a day of redundant content by the number of attendees and their day rates — that figure rarely appears in any training budget line, but it is real money.

The agenda covers products, not your project. You are migrating to a new firewall platform; the course teaches every feature of that platform. Your actual project needs policy migration, HA design and troubleshooting depth — perhaps 40% of the agenda — plus integration topics with your SIEM and your change process, which appear in no catalog at all.

The two-question test

Before booking any catalog course, ask:

1. Which specific tasks should this team be able to do afterwards that they cannot do today?
2. What fraction of the course agenda serves those tasks?

If the answer to the second question is above ~70%, the catalog course is the right buy — this is exactly the case for certification-driven training, where the exam blueprint is the requirement. CCNA for a team standardizing on a networking baseline, or FCP FortiGate before an audit, are catalog courses doing exactly their job.

If the answer is 30–50%, you are about to pay double for half. That is the signal to build instead of buy.

What building looks like

A custom course inverts the catalog logic. Instead of starting from a table of contents, it starts from an audit of your tasks: the project ahead, the architecture in place, what the team already knows. Topics are selected — networking depth here, security elements there, your own tooling throughout — and compressed into a 2–4 day intensive with labs built on your infrastructure patterns, not generic examples.

The economics follow directly:

• One custom intensive typically replaces 2–3 catalog courses, because it carries only the load-bearing content from each.
• Engineer time halves or better: 2–4 days off production instead of one or two five-day weeks.
• The program remains your asset — materials, labs and recordings get reused for onboarding the next hires, which no catalog seat ever does.

There is a legal cleanliness point worth noting too: properly built custom programs use original, instructor-authored materials — not copied vendor courseware. Teaching a technology requires expertise, not a license; official certification prep still runs through authorized partners when a certificate is the goal.

The hybrid that usually wins

In practice, the best training plans mix both instruments deliberately:

• Catalog courses for certifications and baselines — where an external standard defines the content, buy the standard. Organized well (see how scheme A works), even that purchase should land 15–30% below list price.
• Custom intensives for projects and gaps — where your architecture defines the content, build exactly that.
• One plan across both — so the sequencing, budget and reporting live in one place instead of scattered purchase orders. That is the core of managed training.

The waste in corporate IT training does not come from training too much. It comes from buying fixed agendas for variable problems. Match the instrument to the problem, and the same budget trains roughly twice the capability.

Wondering which of your planned courses pass the two-question test? Send us your training list — we’ll mark what to buy, what to build, and what the difference saves. No calls required; quotes within 5 business days.