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This guide is designed to help you find the right PRINCE2 training course. That sounds a simple objective, but as we will see, there are a few common errors that people make. Whether you are choosing for yourself or for your organisation, your choice will be a significant investment of time and money. We would rather you not waste either of those precious resources!

How do I choose a PRINCE2® training course?

This Guide

This guide is designed to help you find the right PRINCE2 training course. That sounds a simple objective, but as we will see, there are a few common errors that people make. Whether you are choosing for yourself or for your organisation, your choice will be a significant investment of time and money. We would rather you not waste either of those precious resources!

It is important that you choose the best training for your own needs or your organisational needs. It is wise not to take the first option that you find.

The PRINCE2 training market has become crowded, complex and dynamic. Suppliers come and go, some with good credentials, others with a poorer history. The aims and objectives of suppliers vary too, and it may be wise to ensure that whoever you choose has a good ‘fit’ with your objectives.

This guide is offered as free advice to anyone interested in PRINCE2 training. It is not sanctioned or vetted by any of the accrediting bodies and is just my personal perspective on the current market for PRINCE2 training. This advice can also be equally applied to MSP® (Managing Successful Programmes) training courses. I should, therefore, state that the accredited organisation that I work for, Pearce Mayfield, assumes no responsibility for any loss or injury caused by actions you may or may not take as a result of reading this guide.

Accreditation

What does that mean? When people talk about 'PRINCE2 Training' they can mean one of a number of things. Usually, they mean accredited PRINCE2 Practitioner training. This normally takes the form of a five-day course including two formal examinations.

Most people want a formal qualification in PRINCE2; the training is merely a means to that end. By going through an accredited training course and taking certain exams, you can gain the PRINCE2 Practitioner Certificate. This entitles you to describe yourself as a 'Registered PRINCE2 Practitioner'.

In certain parts of the project management job market PRINCE2 has become a valuable credential. However, it needs to be kept current; without taking a re-registration exam, the qualification lapses after five years.

It is important to ensure that both the PRINCE2 course and its supplier are ‘accredited’.

Accreditation means:

• the training course and its design fulfils the curriculum set for the examinations;
• the training organisation has sufficient processes to handle the administration, maintenance and delivery of the training in a professional manner; and
• the trainer has 'real world' experience, the ability to deliver a training course, and sufficient in-depth mastery of PRINCE2 to answer questions raised during a course thereby adequately bringing the subject to life in a classroom.

Once the course becomes 'accredited' it is permitted to use copyrighted material to do with PRINCE2.

Once the organisation is accredited if becomes an Accredited Training Organisation (ATO) and is allowed to use PRINCE2 material and the PRINCE2 logo in its training and marketing material and to run PRINCE2 exam centres as part of their course events.  

 Once the trainer is accredited they become an 'Approved PRINCE2 Trainer'. An approved trainer (you've guessed it) can deliver an accredited course alone, as well as invigilate the formal PRINCE2 exams that may be part of that course. So often you don’t need to book a different date for the exams; they become part of the course schedule.  

What about other organisations that are not ATO's but are advertising PRINCE2 training? They are likely to fall into one of three categories:

Affiliates

These, like Cardiff University, are affiliated to an ATO and offer courses and PRINCE2 services through the ATO. These are approved and registered to operate as an affiliate.

Aggregators/Wholesalers

For example, Focus Training offer places on our public PRINCE2 training events in the UK alongside those of other ATOs. The advantage here is that you have a greater choice of place and date for a public course, but the big disadvantage is that you may not know which ATO you are booking with.

'Grey market'

These are vendors selling PRINCE2 illegally. They are not accredited to use Copyright material and they are unlikely to have any external assessment of quality. They cannot offer a formal exam as part of their course, and it is likely that they will refer you to a public exam centre – at separate purchase and additional risk.  If you find a course advertised on e-Bay, for example, if could be dubious, unless it declares the name of the ATO or Affiliate that is selling and delivering the course.

Your Training Course experience

So are all accredited courses the same?

Most definitely not!!

The formal accreditation scheme leaves quite some latitude for the creativity of the course designers. Accreditation gives a minimum quality assurance.

Are all trainers the same? Of course, they are not.

My colleague Patrick Mayfield tells the story of when he was the first Lead Assessor of PRINCE2 training for APM Group in the late 1990’s. He said that he found adequate trainers and great trainers. There were trainers that satisfied all the criteria laid down, but he wouldn't employ them in Pearce Mayfield; for him, they either lacked pizzazz and flair, were on some personal ‘I know it all’ ego trip, or they were just ... well, boring. They didn’t have the ability to engage delegates and to serve them with a learning experience that had inspirational sparkle.

Have things changed a lot…?

The current trainer assessment processes aim to ensure through that assessment of trainers and materials, that delegates can expect a repeatable experience from a particular training organisation. This is a laudable aim but it could be merely an average experience that is being repeated.

So that you make the most of this investment in yourself you need to look a little deeper.

Course Materials

So, what to look for if not all PRINCE2 courses are the same? How do you choose the best?

The materials they produce can give you a very good indication. For example, the course book; is it in full colour or is it tonnes of grey? If the latter, that's good cost-saving by the training organisation, but it is unlikely to stimulate your learning and help your recall in the exam. There is now quite a body of research that shows that colour is important in both cognition and recall.

Also, what is the format of the course book? Is it merely printouts of PowerPoint slides? Again this is easy for the ATO to generate, but there are two problems for the learner with this:

1. Where is the added value to you of this written documentation beyond making sure the trainer covers all the material?

2. What works for you as a visual in the classroom discussion and what is effective as notes for reference some time afterwards are two very different things. They should correspond, but what is a suitable design for one, is not for the other.

Talking of which, are the slides all bullet points? This is not a very clever use of a visual medium in the classroom. Have you ever experienced 'Death by PowerPoint'? If so, you know what I am referring to here. Often training organisations give so much text on a slide that it amounts to a mere representation of the text in the PRINCE2 manual.

More than that, many training courses have a design driven by PowerPoint, and where the trainer uses each new slide primarily as an aide memoir of what they are to say next, like a sort of elaborate Teleprompter. PowerPoint is a useful tool but can produce a fairly boring visual design. Also, do you want to look at visuals that aid your learning or are ones produced for the convenience of the trainer?

"This is all very well," you may be thinking as you read this, "but how do I find out in advance what the material looks like?" Well, search for examples on their web site. Failing that, call them and ask for illustrative samples. The reaction you get may tell you a lot.

Another aspect, of course, is the method the training organisation uses to design its materials.  As mentioned above, default use of PowerPoint, for example, is a method that is likely to produce a pretty dreary learning experience.

Some training organisations now use Activity Based Learning or Accelerated Learning. Here the design changes from being focused on what the trainer needs to deliver the course, to what the learner needs. In this kind of design, sessions are designed around the exercises and games that stimulate learning. Emphasis moves away from lecture mode to practical engagement with the subject by the delegates and the learning that arises from that. This approach is more likely to give you both your qualification but also give you some confidence about putting PRINCE2 into practice afterwards.

Another aspect of your learning is that it is so much more than just the training event.  There is the pre-course work: setting correct expectations, pre- course study and exercises to prepare you to gain the most out of the event.

After the course, you have to put learnings into practice for these to be consolidated into your experience and perhaps become a habit or standard practice for you. Is there any support from the training organisation to help you do this if you want it?

Then there is the whole area of evaluation of your performance in projects. It may be that through no fault of your own, you are not getting the results you want from the training you have received. Where are the measures that might indicate you or your project sponsors need a different or supplementary kind of coaching? Can the training organisation provide that? Why not ask them?

In the learning and development profession, this is all called the learning cycle. Your training course is only part of this cycle. Check to see whether the training organisation could support you through your whole learning cycle. All too many training companies, I regret to say, ‘sheep dip' managers through their training courses, not caring what happens to them afterwards.

Phone a Friend

A great way of finding out about these more qualitative matters is to ask someone who has experienced being trained with this organisation before you.

Be careful about just accepting written testimonials on the training company's web site or brochure. They should have these to give you some confidence, but they are no substitute for asking to speak to someone who has been served by them before. You will find out far more anecdotally about the service you are likely to receive than by what the company presents to you in their advertising.

Non-accredited training

Of course, accredited PRINCE2 training may not be suitable for you or your organisation. In fact, there are some very positive benefits for considering a non-exam based course:

1. Your organisation does not formally use PRINCE2 but uses a derivative of it.
2. You need a workshop to engage your senior managers who are in governance over projects managed the PRINCE2 way.
3. You do not need to be trained in all the aspects of PRINCE2 but merely in its essentials.
4. You and your organisation have identified that you have a specific training need within a PRINCE2 framework.
5. You and your organisation want to use an internal project as a case study so that you can take outputs from the training and immediately use them.
6. You may use a particular computer tool to support projects (e.g. Microsoft Project) and you want a training event that coaches you in both at the same time.

All these are excellent reasons for considering the non-accredited route. Taking the formal examinations out of the event does help you and the other delegates focus more on the practical aspects of topics, how you would apply them on real projects, but without the distraction of formal exams.

All that has been said previously about checking the quality of the training organisation still applies, though. The PRINCE2 and learning credentials of your supplier are just as important.  

(It is also possible that you want neither accredited training nor a particular emphasis on PRINCE2. Do not let yourself or your organisation be railroaded into PRINCE2 Practitioner training if you do not need it. Good training organisations should have some generic or tailored project management training that would suit your requirements.)

Checklist

Here is a checklist to help you choose the right course for you. It summarises most of the rest of this document. It’s quite a list, but you need to determine what matters most to you and to your organisation:

• Is the course run by a PRINCE2 Accredited Training Organisation?
• How many years has the ATO been providing accredited PRINCE2 training?
• Am I provided with the pre-course material? If so, does the ATO tell me how much time I need to set aside to complete this work?
• Are there modular solutions?
• Does the price include the PRINCE2 manual and the Examination fees (Foundation and Practitioner)?

• Is the ATO able to provide me with recent pass rates at Foundation and Practitioner levels?
• Does the ATO have people on their staff who were involved in the development of the Method? Perhaps one of the authoring team.
• Will the course come with additional documentation (course book)? If so, can the ATO provide me with a sample of its contents and format?
• What design approach, if any, has the ATO used in designing its training?
• Are there plenty of games and exercises throughout the course?
• Does the ATO understand and utilise Activity-Based learning or Accelerated Learning?
• Does the ATO provide non-accredited training in PRINCE2?

• Does the ATO provide additional diagnostics/questionnaires as parts of senior management briefings in PRINCE2?
• Can the ATO provide me with referees (people who have recently been on their training)?

• Can the ATO provide me and my organisation with full support throughout my learning cycle?
• Does the ATO also provide accredited training in MSP programme management, Change Management, and Management of Risk if I need it?

• Does my course fee include lunch and refreshments? (Some ‘bargain basement’ courses expect you to fend for yourself at lunchtime which is not a very productive use of your time on a training course.)
• Do professionals within the ATO publish regularly – via articles, books or blogs - on wider issues around PRINCE2?