If you’re a trainer, learning & development leader, or consultant, chances are you’ve considered building your own “organizational culture” skills course.
You may even have started assembling slides, crafting workbook pages, and thinking through day-one workshops.
The aspiration is noble. The outcome can be powerful.
However, let me explain why developing from scratch may not be the best use of your time, energy, or resources.
And even more important — what you should do instead: use our ready-to-go, fully editable workshop pack specifically for culture: the “Corporate Culture Course Material for Trainers” pack here.
1. Culture training is complex — don’t underestimate it
When you develop a culture course from scratch, you’re essentially synthesizing decades of organisational neuroscience, behavioural theory, leadership psychology, structural change, and group dynamics.
It’s not just about values on a wall or a pop quiz about “what our culture is”.
It involves:
- defining what culture is vs what it feels like,
- differentiating culture vs climate vs behaviours,
- unpacking how leadership style, decision-making norms, and communication patterns shape the lived experience of culture,
- providing tools to assess current vs desired culture, close alignment gaps, and embed lived behaviours into daily routines.
Our workshop pack (“Stop Overthinking Your Workplace Culture Program Prep — Start Delivering Editable Training Content For Trainers And Coaches”) already covers all that.
It lays out an agenda, customisable slides, workbooks, games, and exercises that move participants from conceptual awareness to practical action.
If you tried to start this from scratch, you’d spend 20-30 hours (or more) just prepping solid content — time you could instead invest in delivery, marketing or engaging your audience.
2. The prep time sinks (and hidden costs) add up
When you build your own course, you may think you’ll save money — but here’s what actually tends to happen:
- You’ll spend countless hours drafting slide decks, rewriting content, adjusting for branding, and ensuring the flow is seamless.
- You’ll still need to test interactive exercises, icebreakers, and workbooks (and may need to iterate multiple times).
- You’ll carry the risk of “will it land?” — you’ll wonder if your content is relevant, engaging, and aligned with business outcomes.
- As you deliver it, you’ll likely find gaps and need to create new materials, possibly address low engagement, and update references.
With our pack, you get professionally designed slides, editable workbooks, games, activity sheets, and a facilitator manual — all ready to go.
Time saved is time that can be invested in delivering excellence, building relationships with participants, and refining your facilitation craft.
3. Starting with a blank slate often means reinventing the wheel
Many trainers try to “innovate” every time they build a course.
That’s great — innovation matters.
But when you’re building foundational programmes (like culture skills), there’s enormous value in using tried-and-tested frameworks.
In our pack, you’ll find components such as the “Eight Images of Organisations”, the “Cultural Web” framework, the Ouchi model, and tools to assess culture versus strategy.
When you recreate these yourself, you’ll either:
- reproduce something quite similar (wasting time), or
- fudge parts of the theory / weaken your model because you didn’t have the deep breathing space to craft it well.
Instead, use the sturdy foundation — then customise the polish, your voice, your branding, your stories.
4. Using editable materials lets you stay in the facilitator zone
When you build everything from scratch, you become the content creator rather than the facilitator/day-one leader. You’ll spend too much time behind your laptop, too little time in the room interacting with participants.
Our workshop pack gives you full editable rights (slides in PPT, workbook in Word/DOCX) so you can brand it, customise examples, adapt to your voice, and then show up and deliver.
Since the heavy lifting is done, you can stay present with your audience, focusing on engagement, conversations, and live facilitation, rather than worrying about whether slide 23 aligns with slide 24.
5. The results you want (behaviour change, culture shift) need focus, not build-time
Ultimately, culture training isn’t about completing a course. It’s about shifting mindsets, embedding behaviours, and aligning systems.
Suppose you spend 20-30 hours building the course.
In that case, you’ve already used up valuable time that you might otherwise spend on prepping for context, such as client alignment, customizing to the audience, engagement planning, and measuring change.
By using a ready-to-go pack, you free up that time so you can:
- pre-work with the client: “What’s your culture gap?”
- customise scenarios so they resonate with participants.
- plan post-workshop follow-up and reinforcement.
- focus your energy on facilitation brilliance rather than design minutiae.
6. How to make the most of our workshop pack
If you decide to go the smart route (and I strongly suggest you do), here’s how to maximise the value of this product:
- Start by downloading our Corporate Culture Course Material For Trainers.
- Brand the slides and workbooks with your logo, colours, and tone.
- Replace generic examples with stories from your client or organisation, so relevance soars.
- Use the facilitator manual as your backbone — follow the agenda, use the prompts, run the interactive exercises.
- Don’t skip the bonus templates and training games — they add the “spark” that makes a day feel less like a lecture and more like a live, engaging session.
- Plan a follow-up touchpoint after the workshop to sustain momentum — utilize the tools in the pack to support this effort.
- Track changes: Measure shifts in culture perceptions or behavior before and after to demonstrate impact.
7. Final word: Focus on your unique facilitator strengths, not rewriting the syllabus
Your unique value is not in having assembled the slides — your value lies in how you show up as a facilitator, how you engage participants, how you translate content into action, and how you support a culture shift over time.
If you build from scratch, you risk spending 20-30 hours (or more) on content design and missing that critical time on delivery excellence.
By using our workshop pack, you reclaim your time, reduce risk, improve polish, and stay in the zone where you shine.
Take a decisive step: Invest in our culture-skills workshop pack now and start delivering with confidence, clarity, and impact.
You’ve got this — let the content work for you so that you can lead the change.
Catherine Fitzgerald is the founder of Oak Innovation. With over 30 years of experience in the training and development industry, Catherine and her team are ideally positioned to help corporate trainers, people managers, and consultants access editable training course material.
