More and more organisations are adding specialist external training providers to support their internal L&D teams.
Training Mag reports that in 2025, spending on external products and services reached US$ 16 billion, a 29% increase from the previous year.
When we work with client Learning & Development teams, a common question comes up: Is it better to send staff to public courses or arrange private, in-house training for IT, communication, and leadership?
If you manage Learning and Development (L&D) or Human Resources (HR) for an organisation with several staff to train, this article shares five reasons why private IT training is often a better choice than public courses, along with tips for choosing a provider.
What are the benefits of private, in-house training?
1. Public courses are charged per seat. In-house training is charged per outcome.
Corporate IT training usually costs less than buying the same number of seats in public courses, especially for larger groups.
Most L&D managers have calculated this before. You take the per-seat price of a public course, multiply it by the number of staff, and add travel costs and time away from work. The total can quickly become a budget item you need to justify.
Public courses charge per person, which is fine if you only need to train one or two people. But if you need to train a whole team, department, or the entire organisation, this approach becomes expensive. Enterprise IT training lets you pay for a program based on your actual headcount and run it as often as needed.
2. Public course content is generic. Private, in-house training content uses your own tools.
Bespoke IT training can use your real systems, so staff can apply what they learn directly to their work.
A public cybersecurity or PRINCE2 course is designed for a wide audience, so it uses general examples instead of your specific systems, data, or team processes. Staff learn the basics but then have to figure out how to apply them to their own jobs.
Private training avoids this problem. You can design the content around your actual tools and workflows and use your own sample data when possible. Staff can immediately use what they learn in their daily work.
3. Some employee training can't happen in a room full of strangers.
If your staff IT training covers sensitive systems or data, in-house delivery is often the only practical choice.
If you work in a regulated industry, a government agency, or handle sensitive data, strict limits apply. Some training just can't be done in a room with people from other organisations, since you can't openly discuss internal systems, past incidents, or specific processes.
Additionally, if you are running in-house leadership skills training or negotiation training, you might workshop actual deals on the table.
In-house delivery, whether on-site or in a private online session, solves this by keeping all training and discussions within your organisation.
4. One workplace IT training or communication training program can train every site to the same standard.
Private, in-house IT training ensures a consistent standard across all your locations, rather than a mix of different public course experiences.
If you manage HR Training Programs across several countries, like Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines, public courses can lead to inconsistency. Different groups attend different sessions, with different trainers and schedules, so not everyone gets the same level of understanding.
Let’s look at in-house communication skills training. Private, plain language training can help set standards across your departments, locations, and regions.
Organisational training solutions, delivered by the same trainer using the same material, can address that. Every team - wherever they're based - gets trained to the same standard, at the same time, in the same context.
Choosing a corporate learning and development provider: four things to check
When selecting among organisational training solutions providers, look for broad course coverage, real cross-vendor experience, and a provider who can actually deliver in every country you operate in.
Not every provider can deliver in-house training well. Before you commit, check for:
A genuinely broad course catalogue - So you're not juggling five vendors to cover project management, cybersecurity, cloud and IT service management.
Instructors with real cross-vendor experience - Not just one certification to their name.
A regional footprint that can deliver consistently - Get teams trained across every country you operate in, not just one.
Evidence of scale - Ask how many seats and how many organisations they've actually trained.
Lumify Work has spent more than 30 years building exactly that. Its cross-vendor certified instructors deliver standard and bespoke in-house training across Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines (ANZ and PH), from organisation-wide rollouts spanning thousands of seats to smaller, tightly scoped team programs. See what students say. Read about private cybersecurity training that we ran for COMELEC.
We hold Platinum Partner status with PeopleCert (which accredits PRINCE2 and ITIL, another widely used IT service management framework). We are one of only a few official training partners for ISC2 (a leading cybersecurity certification body) in the region and won the Microsoft MCT Superstars Award for FY24 - recognition for having some of the highest-quality Microsoft Certified Trainers in ANZ.
Choosing between workforce training solutions? Here's what to do next
If you're weighing up private training vs public training, the next step is simple: Ask a provider to scope both options side by side, with real numbers for your headcount, rather than relying on the public course price tag alone.
From there, you can identify what suits you best. Other public course alternatives include blended learning, which we also offer.
Ready to talk about in-house training for your team? Contact us to discuss a tailored program for your organisation.
