Can catalog training be company-specific?

Can catalog training be company-specific?

The simplest reason catalog trainings stay “generic” isn’t technical—it’s linguistic: the content often doesn’t speak to anyone, it just explains a topic. It says “customer objection,” but it doesn’t know your customer’s objection; it says “HSE risk,” but it doesn’t use your real on-site risk language; it says “GDPR awareness,” but it doesn’t put your organization’s most common mistake (for example, emailing the wrong recipient) on stage.

In this article, I’ll open up one question mechanically: Can catalog trainings be company-specific? Saying “yes” is easy; the hard part is describing how.

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” [George E. P. Box, 1976]
Catalog content is also a model: it’s usually wrong—but useful in the right place. The problem is assuming it’s “sufficient on its own.”

The nature of catalog training: speed, scale, and the cost

A catalog content producer has to write without knowing a company’s realities. That’s not bad intent; it’s math. A catalog training tries to speak to, at the same time:

What you get is usually the safest common denominator: correct, but lifeless.

The cost shows up in two places:

  1. The cost of connection: The moment an employee doesn’t say “this is my job,” content stops being information and becomes noise.
  2. The cost of transfer: Unless learning carries into real work, “completed” becomes a piece of decor. Catalog content leaves that transfer to the employee.

I still find this behavior puzzling-interesting: The same employee instantly reads a two-line personal note in an internal announcement feed; but when the same topic is a catalog video, it goes into the “I’ll watch later” folder. Sometimes the content quality is the same, the topic is the same—the only difference is belonging.

What we call “company-specific” is actually three layers

When companies hear “company-specific training,” they usually mean the logo. The logo is just the door; inside there are three layers:

1) Language and examples layer (culture)

The same behavior lives in different words in different companies. In one place it’s “customer satisfaction,” elsewhere it’s “return rate.” In one place you say “approval,” elsewhere “reconciliation.” Company culture often hides in vocabulary.

2) Process layer (operations)

Catalog content explains the “ideal process.” Internal reality starts with “here’s how we do it.” For example, on the GDPR side everyone theoretically knows: personal data sharing must be controlled. But in the real world, the mistake usually happens at these two points:

Company-specific training centers not the theory, but a scene that resembles your own mistake.

3) Decision layer (flow)

This is the most critical layer: training starts to resemble the company when it’s not “something you watch,” but a flow you pass through by making decisions. Because companies differ by their decisions: what they tolerate, what they escalate, whose approval they require, when they stop?

Let me correct something: I just said “companies differ by their decisions,” as if every company makes highly rational decisions. A more accurate statement is: companies differ by the assumptions they use in decision moments—and those assumptions are sometimes habit more than rationality.

At Nextrain, the catalog is not “untouchable content”

Classic catalog logic is: content arrives, you distribute it. In my world, the catalog can behave like a starting material—because at Nextrain, on the content side, these capabilities already exist alongside the catalog:

But there’s a sensitive distinction here: I won’t make a magical claim like “the catalog is automatically regenerated for your company every time,” because what’s mechanically true is simpler: catalog content can be re-structured with your company’s examples and made interactive in Nextrain. That’s the real lever that breaks the “generic” feeling.

The moves that usually make a difference at the company level are:

A practical design template for a company-specific catalog (the one I use)

What makes company content “special” is often not big production; it’s small joints in the right places. The template below is concrete enough to bring catalog content closer to your company:

Layer Typical in a catalog Company-specific version With which tool in Nextrain?
Language General terms Company glossary (team/role language) Content production + editing
Example Cross-industry case “Familiar” case taken from the company Interactive video scenario / decision-based simulation
Decision “Right-wrong” narration Options + consequences Branching + real-time test/checkpoint
Duration Single duration Different durations by level Personalized progression (same training, different duration)
Distribution Same for everyone Segment-based targeting Segment-based targeting + campaign management
Follow-up Manual reminders Automated reminders/escalation Autonomy: reminders & follow-up, certificate & periodic
Measurement Completed / time Event-level behavioral traces Views, clicks, answers, time

I like this table because it turns “company-specific” from a romantic goal into a checklist. (People like checklists; I like data.)

One example: turning a GDPR catalog into a company scene

GDPR trainings in catalogs usually flow like this: definitions, data categories, notice, explicit consent, retention, breach notification… All correct. But the mistake employees make is often not “not knowing a definition”; it’s moving fast out of habit.

To make it company-specific, I prefer this: instead of stretching a single “definition” slide, make people decide in a two-minute scene.

Example flow:

Each option’s outcome is written in the company’s real risk language. Then a checkpoint comes: a short but targeted question like “In this situation, which data categories are personal data?”

At this point, a sentence I often hear on the customer side—voiced frequently by Saadet Dinç (whose title in my head is still “‘We’ll Handle It’ Specialist”)—sticks in my ear: “The content is good… but we don’t have our examples.” When Saadet says this, the problem is usually not content quality; it’s that the content doesn’t touch the company’s mistake. The catalog explains “the right thing”; the company lives “the wrong thing.” If training doesn’t come down into the scene of the wrong, it stays sterile.

In Nextrain, what turns this from “watch and pass” into “decide and see” is interactive video/branching and decision-based simulations. Production dependency also decreases; when you update the text, the content stays current (the “change the script → update” approach on the video side is a practical advantage in frequently updated areas like HSE).

There’s also the operational side: HSE trainings are periodic in most companies. In Nextrain, certificate & periodic cycles can be tracked; the system runs the reminder/follow-up flow for upcoming renewals. What removes HSE from being an “audit panic” is often this cycle more than the content.

Company-specific catalog distribution: same content, different teams

A typical mistake when making catalog training company-specific: “We customized the content, let’s send it to everyone.” But a company is already made of segments.

The approach I find more useful:

For example, the same “GDPR Awareness” title:

The content title stays the same; the scene changes because reality inside the company is different. Generic training gives “the same right answer to everyone”; company-specific training shows “everyone their own risk.”

The “company data” issue: can personalization and GDPR coexist?

Companies want two things at the same time: personalization and data security. These don’t have to conflict; but they require architectural seriousness.

On the security side at Nextrain, the clearest line for me is: Akira does not see personal data; data is processed anonymously (hash · mask · strip). In terms of frameworks like GDPR, this breaks the assumption “to personalize, I must see everything.” It’s possible to decide with behavioral patterns; you can say “this person struggled in this module” without knowing first and last name.

This distinction also helps in catalog customization: company examples, processes, policy texts can be used in content; but you don’t have to carry personal data while doing it. Company-specific does not mean “let’s collect personal data.” Often it’s the opposite: with correct anonymization, you can design more freely.

One last criterion: when does a catalog count as “company-specific”?

I can tell with a single test. After the training ends, ask the employee:

If the answer is a fast, clear “yes,” the catalog is no longer behaving like a catalog; it has become part of the company. If the answer is “it was generic,” then even if the content is correct, the system failed to change behavior.

You don’t have to leave this to intuition either. In Nextrain, every action can be tracked at event level: views, clicks, answers, time. In a module you made company-specific, the distribution of answers at decision points tells you: “Where are people going with the wrong intuition?” That’s the moment training production stops being a “content job” and becomes a job that maps the company’s behavior. That transformation is almost always interesting.

A short checklist (the one I use for myself)

Catalog trainings can be company-specific—but when you think of the word “catalog” not as a packaged content product, but as fast-start material. When the company’s language, scenes, and decisions enter the content, the generic thing suddenly starts to resemble real life. And people usually pay better attention to reality; that’s not my claim, it’s a habit of cognition.

Notes

  1. George E. P. Box, “Science and Statistics”, Journal of the American Statistical Association (1976).