Why Generic Training Doesn't Work — And What to Do Instead

A few years ago, I sat in on the debrief of a "communication skills" workshop that a large pharma company had run for their sales managers. It was, by any honest measure, a disaster — not because the trainer was bad, but because the content had been written for a generic audience and the participants spent the whole day quietly thinking "this isn't really my situation." The post-workshop scores were polite. The behavioural change in the months that followed was zero. The L&D budget for soft-skills training got quietly halved the following year.

This isn't a unique story. It's playing out, in different forms, across hundreds of companies in India right now. Generic training that ticks the L&D box but produces no real change. The people in those rooms are smart. The trainers are usually competent. The content is technically correct. So why doesn't it work?

The Core Problem: Context-Free Content

Generic training treats your team as if they're an undifferentiated category — "sales managers," "first-time leaders," "customer service reps" — and assumes the lessons apply equally to all of them. But the specifics of your sales managers' actual workday are wildly different from a generic sales manager's. They sell to a particular industry, with particular pressures, in your company's particular culture, against your specific competitors, to customers with particular expectations.

Generic training skips all of that. It teaches "active listening" in the abstract. Your team needs active listening in the context of an Indian B2B negotiation where the procurement head's body language matters more than their words. Generic training teaches "giving feedback." Your team needs feedback skills calibrated to your company's specific seniority dynamics and the particular relationships they have with senior plant managers in Pune or fund managers in Mumbai.

The gap between generic and specific isn't a minor refinement. It's the difference between learning and not learning.

Why Generic Sells So Well

Given the limitations, why is generic training so widespread? A few honest reasons:

• It's cheap to produce. A training company can write content once and sell it to 200 clients. Custom content takes weeks per client.
• It's easy to buy. An L&D head with a tight quarter can sign off a generic program in a single meeting. Custom programs require multiple discussions, stakeholder alignment, and a real diagnostic process.
• It looks defensible on paper. "We delivered four communication workshops to 240 people" sounds like activity. The fact that it didn't change anything is harder to detect.
• Some training providers actively prefer it. Customisation is operationally messy. Generic content scales better for the provider's business model, even when it underperforms for the client.

What Real Customisation Looks Like

When we use the word "customised" at Bija, we mean something specific. It's not branding — putting your company's logo on a stock deck. It's not selection — picking modules from a catalogue. It's content built from scratch for your context, based on actual diagnostic work.

A genuinely customised program involves these stages, roughly in order:

1. A real diagnostic conversation with both the L&D sponsor and the business leader whose team is being trained. What's the actual problem? What does success look like?
2. Pre-program interviews with a sample of the participants and a few of their managers. What do they think the problem is? What's their day actually like?
3. Industry- and role-specific case writing. The scenarios used in role-play should look like situations your team faces this week, not generic textbook examples.
4. Customised assessment instruments — pre and post — that measure the specific behaviours the training targets.
5. Manager involvement — making sure participants' managers know what their team is learning so they can reinforce it afterward.
6. Post-training reinforcement tailored to your communication channels — your Slack workspace, your LMS, your team's monthly review cadence.

This is more expensive. It's also dramatically more effective. The ratio of behaviour change to rupees spent is enormously better. And paradoxically, customised training often delivers lower total cost of ownership because you don't have to keep redoing it every two years.

What to Ask Before Buying Any Training

If you're about to commission a training program — from us or anyone else — here are the questions worth asking before you sign anything:

• What diagnostic work will you do before designing this program? How long will it take?
• How will the case studies, role-plays, and examples be specific to our industry and roles?
• What does your typical client see, behaviourally, 90 days after the program?
• How will we measure whether anything changed?
• What's the reinforcement plan in the weeks after the workshop?
• Can I speak to one of your past clients in a similar industry?

A serious training provider will welcome these questions and have substantive answers. A generic provider will hedge, redirect to a brochure, or quote a price that's suspiciously low.

A Tale of Two Programs: The Same Topic, Opposite Outcomes

Let me make this concrete with two engagements from our own files — same topic, similar audiences, radically different results. Details are anonymised.

Program A. An auto-components manufacturer near Chennai asked us for "communication skills for plant supervisors" and wanted it delivered in three weeks, no diagnostic, fixed budget. Against our own advice, we ran a lightly adapted version of standard content. The sessions were lively, the feedback sheets averaged 4.3 out of 5, and everyone shook hands warmly. Ninety days later, the plant head told us plainly: nothing had changed on the floor. The supervisors still weren't flagging line issues upward until they became stoppages — which, it turned out, was the actual problem "communication skills" had been hired to fix. We hadn't trained for that problem, because nobody had done the work of finding it.

Program B. A year later, a different manufacturer came with the same request. This time we insisted on the diagnostic: two days at the plant, interviews with eight supervisors and three shift managers. What surfaced wasn't a skill gap at all — supervisors knew perfectly well how to report a problem. They were staying silent because the previous plant head had publicly torn into the last supervisor who escalated "prematurely." The program we built barely resembled a communication workshop: it was scenario drills on when to escalate, co-designed with the new plant head, who opened every session personally with the message that escalation would be rewarded. Ninety days later, near-miss reporting had tripled and two potential line stoppages had been caught early — each worth more than the entire training budget.

Same topic on the purchase order. The difference was never the trainer or the content quality. It was whether anyone had found the real problem before designing for it.

Generic in Disguise: Four Red Flags

The trickier problem is that almost nobody sells training as "generic" anymore — every brochure in India says "customised." Here's how to spot stock content wearing a customised label:

• The proposal arrives too fast. If a detailed program design lands within 48 hours of your first call, it existed before your call. Real customisation can't start until the diagnostic ends.
• The case studies are famous companies. Role-plays about Google, Tata, or a nameless "large FMCG company" are stock content. Customised scenarios name your products, your customer types, your approval chains.
• Nobody asks to talk to participants. A provider who designs a program without speaking to a single person who'll sit in the room is designing from assumption.
• The price doesn't change with the diagnostic. If the quote is identical whether or not they do discovery work, the discovery work is theatre.

The Quiet Cost of Settling

I want to end with what's at stake. When a company runs ineffective training, the cost isn't just the wasted budget. It's the slow erosion of the team's belief that L&D matters at all. People sit through a couple of dull workshops and quietly conclude that "training" is something HR does because they have to. That belief, once formed, is hard to undo.

The L&D leaders who change this in their organisations do it by refusing to buy generic. They make a few selective investments in deeply customised programs that visibly work. They get the senior business leader who sponsored it to say in an all-hands meeting "this actually changed how my team operates." And the organisational appetite for serious development comes back to life.

That's the better story. It requires saying no to a lot of generic offers. It's worth it.