A corporate training company sells trainer days to client firms. Here is how to hire, grade, schedule and keep trainers and programme managers while keeping delivery quality steady across clients.
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Share your requirementsA corporate training company designs and delivers programmes for businesses on topics such as leadership, sales, communication, soft skills and technical skills. The team includes full-time trainers, a panel of freelance trainers, instructional designers, programme managers who coordinate each client, sales or account managers and operations staff. Revenue depends on trainer days sold, so utilisation matters as much as quality. Clients ask for named trainers, ask for changes close to the date and judge the company on feedback scores. Trainers travel between cities and clients. See also HR for education. Good HR here means fair grading of trainers, a tidy freelance panel, honest utilisation targets and care of the programme managers who hold it together.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in corporate training companies. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
Trainers are judged on days delivered, so quiet weeks feel like failure and busy weeks leave little time to prepare.
If that person is unavailable, the company has no equal substitute and risks the account.
Trainers are added by recommendation, rated informally and engaged on varied terms.
Decks and exercises created by trainers are reused or taken away without a written understanding.
They juggle logistics, client calls and trainer queries across many programmes at once, with late nights before delivery.
Scores are collected at the end of a programme but rarely feed into coaching or panel decisions.
Trainers go from city to city with short rest, and family strain shows up in resignations.
Account managers agree custom content or extra days that trainers must meet without enough time.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Compensation, Payroll and Benefits; Performance Management; HR Operations and Governance. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for education, not in general.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
The pieces a corporate training companies business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Observe a session, check client references and place the trainer in a grade by topic and level.
Observe a session, check client references and place the trainer in a grade by topic and level. The recruitment process sets the method.
Day rates by grade, preparation time, cancellation, travel and content ownership in one page.
Day rates by grade, preparation time, cancellation, travel and content ownership in one page. Confirm with a qualified professional and keep it in HR documentation.
A forward calendar showing booked days, prep days and rest, with targets that allow for all three.
A forward calendar showing booked days, prep days and rest, with targets that allow for all three. The attendance, shift and leave process fits.
Read client scores with each trainer, coach on gaps and use patterns in panel decisions, within the performance management process.
Read client scores with each trainer, coach on gaps and use patterns in panel decisions, within the performance management process.
For each named trainer, a second who has co-delivered, so clients can accept a swap.
For each named trainer, a second who has co-delivered, so clients can accept a swap.
A short sign-off from the programme manager before custom content or extra days are promised.
A short sign-off from the programme manager before custom content or extra days are promised.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Observed delivery and referee checks before a trainer joins the panel.
Panel terms and content ownership in plain written form.
Use of client feedback to coach trainers.
A fair structure for trainer grades and day rates.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in education, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Faculty, administrative and support staff leave for different reasons. How to ask what shaped their decision and act on it within the academic calendar.
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Simple variable pay structures for product and engineering teams: four options, why individual metrics backfire, a build plan and a one page outline to adapt.
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A practical design for an IT services appraisal cycle: when to run it, how to rate fairly across projects, and how to explain hikes so they hold.
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Every growing company reaches a point where the founder approving everything stops being speed and starts being the bottleneck. Twelve signs it has happened, and what to fix first.
9 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Grade trainers by topic, level and client feedback and set a range for each grade. Review the ranges yearly and apply them consistently.
Build a second trainer who has co-delivered, introduce them early and make the swap part of the account plan.
Decide at engagement and write it down. Confirm the wording with a qualified professional so reuse and exit are clear.
Count preparation, travel and rest days as work. A target based only on delivery days pushes trainers toward burnout.
Cap programmes per manager, use checklists and shared calendars and review the load each month.
Ask the delivery lead to sign off scope, trainer availability and preparation time before the promise goes to the client.
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