How to Choose a Training Provider for Your Public Sector Team

There are many good providers of live professional development training for public sector professionals out there. The right one for your team depends less on who is ‘best’ and more on a handful of decisions specific to your organisation, your procurement rules and what you're trying to achieve. Here's how to work through them.

Internal or External

The first fork is whether to look inside government or outside it. Government Skills offers training that's often open to all civil servants and some wider public sector organisations, delivered through KPMG and EY as prime contractors giving access to a range of providers - a set-up that will eventually be replaced by a new National School for Government and Public Services in 2028. Alternatively, your organisation may run its own programmes through an in-house L&D team, facilitator or academy, or maintain its own gated list of approved external suppliers. For certain organisations, particularly government departments, Government Skills is likely the easiest route to quality training. The trade-off is variety: the choice is limited, and you may not find exactly what you're looking for, particularly for bespoke training.

Framework or Not

Go external and you'll find far more variety - a blessing and a curse, since too much variety can make it hard to choose. If your procurement processes are strict, your best route is often a framework such as GCA's RM6219 or YPO's 000999 - between them, they cover most qualified providers of scale. Even where procurement doesn't require a framework, choosing a provider approved on one means they've been stress-tested on quality, contingency and resilience, among other things. That's worth something if you haven't worked with the provider before and looking for some sort of validation that goes beyond online reviews.

There are plenty of excellent providers outside Government Skills, RM6219 and YPO 000999. That's not a reason to avoid them, particularly if you're after something specific, specialised or limited in scope. It just means you'll need another way to check quality before you commit.

Sector Specialism or Subject Matter Specialism

A provider that specialises in the public sector understands the working environment, uses relevant examples, and can carry best practice and trends between its clients. Weigh that against the times subject matter expertise matters more - training in customer experience or social media, for example, may call for a specialist in that field over a public sector generalist. Ideally, a provider offers both. When it doesn't, decide which matters more for the need at hand.

Scope

Very few providers cover the full range of your likely people development needs, and you may not want one that does - it can mean a jack of all trades, or a large corporate provider with limited time for you and your needs, where a sizeable share of what you pay goes on corporate infrastructure, not delivery. A provider with a very narrow scope can be the right call when you need particular expertise and are ready to manage a more complex supply chain, but isn't ideal otherwise. A provider that covers more than one area of expertise means fewer supplier relationships to manage, and even when the requirement starts off very specific, the familiarity built up over time can extend to emerging needs in related areas.

Size

As we all know, size doesn't matter - except when it does. Generally, the smaller the provider, the more personalised the service and the lower the cost; the larger, the better the contingency, quality assurance and capacity. There's often a sweet spot in the middle: specialist trainers backed by enough infrastructure for admin, logistics, compliance and contingency, without losing the personal, price-friendly approach that comes from not relying on a single trainer.

What Does ‘Bespoke’ Mean?

‘Bespoke’ gets used a lot by professional development providers, but it means different things depending on who you ask. For some, it's a conversation beforehand to understand who's in the room and tweak an off-the-shelf product for the day. For others, it's building a programme from close to scratch. Many sit somewhere in between. Establishing exactly what the deliverables are - including at the development stage, impact reporting and recommendations - is the way to know what you're getting, and to avoid surprises or expectations that don't match reality.

People

Professional development is one of the most personal things a workplace does. It touches on people's sense of self-worth and confidence, and psychological safety matters throughout. This is people training people, so make sure the people delivering it are on the same page as you - people you can talk to, who will listen and understand you, and who will handle your team with care. Rigid procurement processes, common in public sector settings, often make that connection harder to judge - but it's essential. Our advice: always speak to a provider before you decide, and make sure the conversation goes beyond the technical, into their approach, philosophy and style.

Where We Fit

Since you've read this far, it's fair to say where we sit against these questions ourselves. Teamshaper is a public sector specialist, and a GCA RM6219 (Learning & Training Services) and YPO 000999 approved supplier. We build bespoke programmes around a client's own strategy and people plan using 8 CPD-accredited modules, which gives us a wide breadth of training areas we cover. Each programme includes a full diagnostic stage and impact reporting, and always delivered by highly experienced practitioners and subject matter experts. Lower overheads than a large corporate provider mean a lower price for the same reliability. If you're after a specialist that's small enough to build something genuinely bespoke but accredited and resourced enough to deliver it reliably, that's the specific gap we built Teamshaper to fill.

We hope this helps. If you're at that crossroads and would value some advice, we're happy to offer it at no cost and no commitment, whether you end up choosing us or not - get in touch.