In-house or public course: the honest comparison
The answer usually turns on delegate numbers and on whether the material needs to be yours. Here is where each one genuinely wins.
25 August 2026/5 minute read
The arithmetic is the easy part. A public course is priced per delegate, so cost rises in a straight line with headcount. In-house is priced for the programme, so the per delegate cost falls with every person you add. Somewhere around six delegates the two lines cross, and past that in-house is usually cheaper as well as better.
But cost is rarely the deciding factor, and treating it that way produces the wrong answer in both directions.
A public course wins when you have one or two people, when the value is partly in who else is in the room, and when you want your person exposed to how other organisations handle the same problem. That cross-pollination is real and it is the thing in-house cannot reproduce. It also wins when you need the training soon and cannot assemble a group.
In-house wins when the material has to be yours. If the point is that your team can apply a method to your contracts, your registers, your systems and your constraints, then a generic case study is a detour. In-house also wins when the group needs to reach a shared position, because the discussion in the room is part of the output, not a side effect.
In-house has a failure mode worth naming. A room full of colleagues who all report to the same person will not say the awkward thing. If the honest conversation is the point, either the manager stays out of the room or you accept that a public course gives people permission a home venue never will.
The practical answer for most organisations is both. Send one person to a public course to test whether the programme is any good, then run it in-house for the team once you know.