The short answer: An off-the-shelf course teaches a subject. A designed program improves performance. It does so when it is built on the real tasks of the role, written in professional language the employee understands on first reading, uses examples from the organization's own systems and procedures, and is tied to a competency measured before and after.
The first thing that comes to mind for any HR or training manager, when performance problems are raised, is training. As if training were the magic solution, the one word that can fix everything. So HR moves to adopt initiatives and training programs to address organizational performance problems, without a serious training needs analysis (TNA) that would reveal the real performance problems. Do employees need training at all? And which competencies do they need to be trained on?
Now suppose the analysis was done, and it confirmed that the organization does have a competency gap. A second question remains, no less serious, and it is rarely asked with the same rigour. What should the training program look like?
Because the difference between a program that improves performance and one that gets consumed and forgotten is not the size of the budget or the quality of the production. And the difference between a course and a program is not a matter of wording. A course is bought by title. A program is designed around a gap. That design comes down to four decisions, all taken before anyone writes the first slide.
First, confirm the problem is a training problem
There is a quick test, proposed by Robert Mager and Peter Pipe in Analyzing Performance Problems. Could the employee do the task if their life depended on it?
If the answer is yes, the problem is not a missing competency. It is an undefined standard, a broken procedure, or an incentive pushing the other way, and no training program will fix it however well built. If the answer is no, you have a real training need. Three signals confirm it: the task is new to the role, nobody meets the standard including experienced staff, or the people who do it well differ in method rather than in circumstances.
Once a competency gap is confirmed, the question moves from "should we train?" to "how do we design the program?" That is where the four rules begin.
1. Design the program around the job task, not a general topic
Most training programs start from a topic, and topics do not exist in job descriptions. What exists in a job description is tasks. A renewal call. An urgent maintenance request. A work permit. A quarterly performance conversation. A customer complaint past its deadline.
The difference between the two is not only in the wording. It decides what the content can contain — a general title forces theoretical content, while a task-based title forces content the employee can apply on Sunday morning:
| General title (bought from a catalogue) | Task-based title (designed for the organization) |
|---|---|
| Effective Communication Skills | Telling a customer their shipment is late without losing them |
| Time Management and Prioritisation | Ordering five urgent maintenance requests that arrive at the same time |
| Customer Service Fundamentals | Handling a price objection on a renewal call |
| Workplace Safety Principles | Issuing a hot work permit under your organization's own procedure |
| Supervisory Leadership Skills | Running the quarterly performance conversation with an employee behind target |
The task-based version forces the designer to know how the organization actually works. That is exactly why it is there. A program that does not know how the organization works cannot change the way it works.
The cost of ignoring this rule shows in the global benchmarks. In a McKinsey survey on building organizational capabilities, only 33% of executives said their training programs focused on the capability that mattered most to company performance (McKinsey, 2010). Two thirds of training spend was aimed at the wrong target. Not because of weak execution, but because the starting point was a topic rather than a task.
Once the task is defined, the next decision determines whether the employee will understand the program at all.
2. Write in language the employee understands on first reading
Open any off-the-shelf course and you find the same language. Long sentences, passive verbs, translated management terms, and the tone of a formal report addressed to a regulator rather than to an employee who has to do something tomorrow.
This language is not a mark of rigour. It is a tax on comprehension. The employee reads the sentence twice to work out what is required, decides it is not worth it, and clicks through to the certificate.
The difference is not between formal and informal. It is between report language and professional language — a shorter sentence, a direct verb, addressing the employee, and a concrete example instead of a generalisation:
| Where | Report language | Professional language |
|---|---|---|
| Module intro | "Adherence to service quality standards constitutes a foundational pillar contributing to the enhancement of the organization's brand perception among its target audience." | "A customer waiting more than two minutes on the line hangs up. This module is about those two minutes." |
| Objective | "This training module aims to equip the learner with the requisite knowledge and skills for optimal handling of objection scenarios." | "By the end of this module you will know exactly what to say when a customer tells you the price is too high." |
| Procedure | "Employees should observe the organization's approved procedures when undertaking the escalation process in accordance with the applicable governing controls." | "Escalate the case if 24 hours pass with no reply. The form is in the service system, and the 'escalation reason' field is mandatory." |
| Assessment | "Which of the following is deemed most appropriate in the context of handling customer objections?" | "A customer of three years says the renewal price went up 12%. What is the first sentence you say to them?" |
Notice a small detail in the professional-language examples: they never say "learner." It is a classroom word. The employee does not see themselves as a learner. They see themselves as an employee doing a job. Language that addresses them as an employee reaches them faster.
The last example also shows that this is not only about wording. A vague question produces a vague answer and proves nothing. A question with a customer, a tenure, a number, and a demand for a first sentence tells you whether the employee can actually do the job.
Content that needs a second reading to be understood will not get one. It will get clicked through.
There is a structural reason behind this, and it is worth stating. Professional Arabic content available online is limited. Arabic accounts for no more than 0.6% of websites whose content language can be identified, against 49.7% for English (W3Techs, June 2026). What does exist leans towards news, official material and government correspondence. So when a content writer sits down to write training material in Arabic, the report register is the nearest model to hand. Not because it is the most suitable, but because it is the most available.
Once the language is clear, the next question is whether the examples inside it look like the employee's work or somebody else's.
3. Take the examples and scenarios from inside the organization
An employee can tell within ninety seconds whether a program is about their organization.
A contracting company in Riyadh buys an off-the-shelf safety course. The slides show a European construction site, a work permit procedure that does not match the company's own, and temperatures nothing like a summer in the Eastern Province. A Saudi bank buys a personal data protection awareness course, and the employee finds translated terms that do not match the statutory wording they will see in the bank's own internal documents. In both cases the employee shifts from participant to compliant, clicking to the end.
Off-the-shelf libraries earn their place for general capabilities that transfer between organizations. Negotiation, presentation skills, general management, basic digital literacy. They are a weak instrument for the competencies that distinguish one organization from another, because those competencies live in its procedures, its systems, its products and its customer situations. No catalogue holds that detail.
The material needed to build that context is already inside the organization. Approved operating procedures. Screens from the systems employees use every day. Real cases from the complaints log or the incident reports. Role titles and forms as they are actually used. Collecting it takes days, and it is the difference between a program that gets applied and one that gets watched.
One decision remains, and it is the one that turns the program from an activity into evidence.
4. Tie every unit to a competency you can measure
A training unit with no defined competency behind it cannot be judged. The program ends, the completion rate is reported, and the question "did performance improve?" stays unanswered.
The alternative is direct. One competency per unit, taken from the competency framework, with an assessment before and after on that same competency. This does two things at once. It turns the program's result into a number that can go in front of the executive team, and it shows early which unit had no effect so it can be revised before the next cohort.
There is a direct financial return too. Average formal training hours per employee fell from 17.4 in 2023 to 13.7 in 2024, while the average cost of a training hour rose from $123 to $165 (ATD State of the Industry, 2025). Fewer hours at a higher price means every unit has to be justified. And a unit tied to a defined competency is usually shorter: 25 minutes for one role, not four hours for a whole department.
What design alone cannot fix
It is fair to say this plainly. The best training program will not work in an environment that resists it.
If the tool does not support the new behaviour, if the incentive system penalises the employee who applies it, or if the line manager does not reinforce it after the program ends, the result is the same however good the design. Gallup's analysis found that line managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement (Gallup, State of the American Manager, 2015).
Another Gallup figure marks the boundary precisely. Manager training on its own raised the share of managers thriving at work from 28% to 34%. When it was combined with ongoing development and follow-up, the share rose to 50% (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2025).
The training program moved the number six points. The system around it moved it sixteen points more. Good design is necessary but not sufficient. Build the program on the task, the language and the context, then agree with the line manager what they will do in the following four weeks, before the program launches rather than after.
How Lumofy designs training programs for organizations
Lumofy is a workforce capability platform that also produces custom training programs for organizations across the Gulf, delivering full libraries in Arabic and English on compressed timelines. The four rules above are not advice we write. They are how the work is done.
- We start from a competency framework, not a catalogue. We define what each role should be able to do, measure where employees stand against that standard, and turn only the confirmed gaps into programs.
- We build every unit on a real job task, from your organization's procedures, systems and customer cases, not from generic scenarios.
- We write Arabic natively, not translated. Right-to-left design from the first wireframe, voiceover recorded from an Arabic script, and assessment questions written in Arabic in professional language the employee understands.
- We tie every unit to a competency with a before-and-after assessment, so the program's result is a number rather than an impression.
- We produce at volume rather than one program at a time, which makes covering twenty roles possible within a normal training budget.
Organizations that follow this sequence report identifying skill and high-potential gaps up to 40% faster than with their previous approach. Worked examples are collected in Lumofy's customer stories.
"The animated learning content they produced for Almajdouie Motors Academy was highly effective at building awareness of the topic we were targeting. Lumofy turned learning into an inspiring and impactful experience."
Murad Mohammed Al-Marei, Training & Development Manager at Almajdouie Motors Academy (quote translated from Arabic).
FAQ
Start from the job task, not the topic. Identify the task that is not performed to standard, tie it to one competency from the competency framework, build the unit on examples from the organization's systems and procedures, write it in direct professional language, and add a before-and-after assessment on that same competency.
Because they are built on a general topic rather than a job task inside your organization. Within ninety seconds the employee notices that the procedures, systems and cases on screen belong to another company, and shifts from participant to compliant. Off-the-shelf courses work for general transferable capabilities, not for the competencies that distinguish your organization.
Both are correct language. Report language uses long sentences, passive verbs and management generalisations, so the employee reads the sentence twice. Professional language uses a short sentence, a direct verb, addresses the employee, and gives a concrete example. The difference is not formality. It is clarity about what to do.
Tie every unit to one competency, measure that same competency before and after the program, then check whether the performance indicator the program was built to move actually moved. Completion rate measures consumption rather than capability, and is not evidence on its own in front of the executive team.
It depends on volume and pace. One or two programs a year can be built in-house given an instructional designer, a content writer and a media producer. Covering twenty roles within a year needs production capacity most training functions do not have, and that is where volume production with a specialist provider becomes faster and cheaper per unit. [Lumofy's pricing](/pricing) is built around that volume question.
Where to start
Take one training program that ran last year and changed nothing, and hold it against the four rules. Was it built on a job task or a general topic? Could an employee understand it on first reading? Were the examples from your organization? Was there a competency measured before and after?
Answering these four questions usually reveals where the budget went. It also defines the shape of the next program.
