Overview
Most training and development needs fit recognizable patterns. A team needs to communicate more effectively. A group of managers needs a stronger foundation in leadership fundamentals. An organization wants to build negotiation skills across a sales force. For these situations, an existing program, adapted to the client’s context, is usually the right answer.
Some situations are different. The need is specific, the constraints are real, and no existing program maps cleanly to what the organization is trying to accomplish. A curriculum needs to be built from scratch around a proprietary process. A project was abandoned mid-development and needs someone to assess the wreckage and finish the work. A deliverable exists in a format nobody on the internal team knows how to produce. A communication challenge requires a video, a guide, a tool, or something else entirely that falls outside the boundaries of a training catalog.
These are the situations Business Training Works was built to handle. When a client’s need does not fit a standard program, we design the solution that does.
What Custom Work Looks Like in Practice
Custom engagements take many forms. The common thread is that we start with the client’s specific goal rather than with an existing program. What we build follows from what the situation requires, not from what we happen to have available. The sample projects below represent the range of work we have completed for clients across industries and sectors.
Custom Course Development
Business Training Works developed two online courses for a national insurance association covering communication skills for its membership. The courses required content calibrated to the association’s specific audience, regulatory context, and learning objectives rather than a generic communication curriculum.
For a national nonprofit organization, we stepped in after a vendor abandoned a development project mid-course. We assessed the existing work, identified what was salvageable and what needed to be rebuilt, and brought the course to completion within the organization’s deadline. The ability to diagnose someone else’s incomplete work, make sound judgments about what to keep, and fill the gaps cleanly requires a different set of skills than building from scratch. We have done both.
Extended Reinforcement and Follow-Up Systems
A hospital system engaged Business Training Works to develop twelve months of follow-up materials to support an ongoing customer service training initiative. The materials included interactive exercises, case studies, and structured activities designed to reinforce learning over time rather than allow it to fade after the initial session.
This kind of engagement reflects a clear understanding of how training actually works. A single session, however well designed, does not produce lasting behavior change on its own. Reinforcement delivered at intervals, connected to the original learning and grounded in real work situations, is what makes the difference between a training event and a genuine shift in how people operate.
Conference and Publication Support
Business Training Works helped the same national nonprofit organization produce a comprehensive guide exceeding one hundred pages for its national training conference. The guide served as a resource for attendees throughout the event and as a reference they could return to afterward. Producing a publication at this scale requires editorial discipline, structural clarity, and the ability to synthesize a large volume of material into something that is genuinely useful rather than merely comprehensive.
Video Production and Storytelling
A community college engaged Business Training Works to produce two videos promoting its service-learning programs. The goal was to communicate the impact of those programs in a way that would attract participants and help audiences understand what the experience actually involves. Effective video for this purpose requires clarity about the story being told, sharp editorial judgment about what to include and what to cut, and the ability to translate institutional pride into something a prospective participant finds compelling.
A separate hospital engagement involved a different kind of storytelling. As part of a capital campaign, Business Training Works developed a video documenting the institution’s history. This project required sensitivity to the organization’s legacy, the ability to work with leadership and stakeholders who each had their own perspective on the institution’s story, and the judgment to shape that material into something that would resonate with donors and inspire confidence in the campaign.
Culture, Values, and Orientation Programs
Business Training Works worked with a bank to help leadership articulate the institution’s mission, vision, values, and operating standards. Once that foundational work was complete, we developed a new-hire orientation training program built around those elements. The goal was to ensure that new employees arrived with a clear understanding of what the organization stood for, how it expected people to operate, and what membership in that culture required from the beginning of their tenure rather than absorbing it informally over months.
This kind of engagement requires two distinct capabilities: the strategic clarity to help an organization name what it believes and how it operates, and the instructional design skill to turn that material into a learning experience that lands with a new employee on their first week.
Digital Strategy and Web Publishing
Business Training Works helped a large school system develop a web-publishing strategy and the guidelines that would govern how the system communicated online. This project was not a training engagement in the traditional sense. It was a consulting engagement requiring an understanding of organizational communication, digital publishing, audience needs, and the practical realities of maintaining content standards across a complex, decentralized organization. The output was a clear framework the school system could follow and a set of guidelines its staff could actually apply.
International Program Coordination
Business Training Works has coordinated multiple international visits for government delegations, managing the logistics, facilitation, and cultural context required to make those visits productive. This work requires operational precision, cultural awareness, and the ability to design experiences that serve the delegation’s learning and relationship-building objectives while navigating the practical complexity of international travel and scheduling.
What Makes Custom Work Succeed
Custom engagements succeed when the client and the development partner are genuinely clear about what the work is supposed to produce. The most important conversations happen at the beginning: What is the specific problem this project is solving? Who is the audience, and what do we know about them? What does a successful deliverable look like in concrete terms? What constraints govern the timeline, the budget, and the format?
Business Training Works brings the same diagnostic discipline to custom work that we bring to training design. We ask those questions before we build anything. If the answers are incomplete or inconsistent, we say so, because building the wrong thing efficiently is not a service to anyone.
We are direct about what we can and cannot do. Not every custom request is a project we are positioned to execute well, and we will tell you that honestly rather than take work we are not suited for. When the fit is right, we move quickly from diagnosis to design to delivery, keeping the client involved at the decision points that matter without making the process harder than it needs to be.
Starting a Conversation
If you have a need that does not fit a standard program, contact Business Training Works to describe what you are trying to accomplish. We will ask a few direct questions, give you an honest read on whether we are the right partner for the work, and recommend a path forward if we are. Custom projects begin with a conversation, and that conversation costs nothing.