For an individual, that breadth can be helpful. At enterprise level, it creates a different problem.
You may be developing hundreds or thousands of people across different roles, locations and levels of experience. The learning needs to feel relevant to the person in the room while still serving a recognisable business need. It needs to work at scale without becoming painfully generic. And at some point, somebody is probably going to ask what all this development actually achieved.
Which is a reasonable question.
So perhaps the best place to start isn't, what personal development training should we offer?
It's... what do we need people to do differently?
Personal development training helps people build the human and professional capabilities that make them more effective at work. That might include communication, influencing, presentation skills, problem-solving, collaboration, confidence, self-awareness or managing priorities.
But enterprise personal development training needs to go further than simply exposing people to useful ideas. It needs to help them use those skills in the situations their work actually puts them in.
Knowing a model for influencing is one thing. Trying to win support for an idea from three senior stakeholders who have completely different priorities is another.
That distinction matters as not acknowledging this would lead to knowledge not sticking or being effective at all.
Recent OECD research found a significant gap between the skills people possess and how often they actually get to use them at work. Highly skilled employees can still have relatively few opportunities to apply those capabilities in their day-to-day roles.
Developing a skill is only part of the job. The real question is whether that skill shows up when somebody actually needs it.
Otherwise, it is like owning a toolbox, needing to hammer in a nail, reaching inside, grabbing the sandwich you packed for lunch… and hitting the nail with that instead.
The right tool was there. You had the ability to do the job. What was missing was the ability to recognise when to use it.
Imagine two organisations both ask for communication skills training.
In one, teams that previously worked independently now need to collaborate across functions. Meetings are becoming territorial, information isn't travelling properly and decisions are slowing down.
In the other, technically brilliant specialists are increasingly presenting recommendations to senior clients. Their expertise isn't the problem. Explaining it simply and persuasively is.
Same training category but a completely different problem.
A generic "Effective Communication" workshop might contain useful material for both groups, but you're asking participants to do a lot of the translation themselves. Cherry-picking the content for the relevant bits.
Before choosing personal development training, get more specific. What is happening now? What would you like to happen instead? Who needs to behave differently? In which situations? And what currently gets in their way?
This is essentially why Excel's own approach starts with Discover before moving through Design, Deliver, Evaluate and Embed. The learning is built around the organisation, its people and what it is trying to achieve. Excel Communications 2026 Creds…
"We need better communication" is a starting point, however It's not yet a training brief.
Enterprise L&D has a familiar tension. You need consistency at scale, but you also need the learning to feel relevant.
The answer isn't necessarily to create a different programme for every department, level and geography until your learning architecture resembles a particularly hostile and complicated family tree... the kind with 'great uncles twice removed' etc.
Often, the capability can stay consistent while the application changes.
Take influencing... A new employee may need to influence colleagues without authority. A technical specialist may need to influence a non-technical stakeholder. A senior leader may need to build support across functions with competing priorities.
The principles can be shared. The conversations, scenarios and practice should feel recognisable to the people learning them.
That's a useful distinction when you're comparing training providers. Don't just ask whether the programme is "bespoke". Ask what will actually be tailored, and why?
Excel's approach is to tailor programmes around the client's people, goals and culture rather than simply delivering the same content everywhere.
Changing the logo on slide one does not quite count.
A good provider should be able to explain the connection between the business need, the capability being developed, the learning experience and the behaviour expected afterwards.
First, look at how they diagnose the need. Be slightly suspicious of anyone who appears to know the solution before they've properly understood the problem.
Then look at relevance. Will examples, practice and conversations resemble the real situations participants face? People are much more likely to see how learning applies when they don't have to translate every exercise back into their own working world.
And then ask whether the provider can genuinely operate at enterprise scale. A workshop that works beautifully for 20 people isn't automatically ready for 2,000. Scale introduces facilitator consistency, localisation, logistics, scheduling, quality assurance, delivery formats and programme management.
Excel, for example, supports blended, virtual, in-person and on-demand learning, with Learning Operations support for coordinating areas such as trainers, logistics and global programme delivery.
It isn’t the bit that usually gets the headline. But when you’re running learning across countries, time zones and multiple cohorts, smooth operations are what allow the good stuff to happen.
A workshop can be excellent. People leave with useful ideas and with loads of notes. Based on this they decide they're definitely going to do something differently.
Then normal work returns.
Meetings. Emails. Deadlines. Clients. Priorities. The new technique that seemed perfectly sensible on Thursday quietly disappears by Monday afternoon. This is why embedding matters.
The OECD's 2026 research on workplace skills is useful here because it shows that capability and application are not the same thing. People need opportunities to actually use the skills they have developed. So ask what happens beyond the formal learning.
Will people practise the skill between sessions? Are managers involved? Is there something useful to revisit later? Will the workplace actually give people opportunities to behave differently?
Embedding shouldn't be the bit added once the training has already been designed. It should influence the design itself.
Personal development isn't always wonderfully tidy to measure. Confidence, communication, self-awareness and influence don't arrive with helpful little counters attached. But that doesn't mean you can't evaluate them.
CIPD's guidance on learning evaluation argues that effective evaluation should connect learning to identified performance gaps and business objectives.
That brings us back to the original question. What do you actually want people to do differently?
If managers become better at difficult conversations, what would you expect to observe? If specialists become more persuasive presenters, what changes? If teams handle disagreement better, where should that show up?
Your evidence might include participant feedback, assessments, manager observations, behavioural measures or relevant business data. It will depend on the programme.
You don't need to wrap every piece of learning in an enormous evaluation machine. But you do need a credible connection between the problem, the learning, the behaviour and the outcome. Otherwise, success has an unfortunate tendency to become:
"People really enjoyed it."
Lovely.
Probably not the whole reason you paid for it though is it?
The best personal development training isn't remembered because somebody can quote slide 17 six months later. It's remembered because something changed.
A specialist explains a complicated idea more clearly. Someone challenges an assumption they would previously have kept quiet about. A manager handles a difficult conversation without making it worse. A meeting reaches an actual decision.
Nobody announces that they're now applying Module Three. They just behave differently.
That's the standard I'd use when choosing personal development training for an enterprise. Don't begin with the catalogue. Begin with the moments at work you want to change and then build backwards from there.
Thanks
Alex & The Excel Team