Every so often a new client asks whether the course can be built around their industry. Sometimes the word is “tailored”. The worry underneath it is always the same: our environment is unusual, our people deal with things other people don’t, and a trainer who hasn’t worked here won’t be able to teach them much.

I understand where it comes from. It is also, almost always, wrong. You already know your industry better than any trainer will. That was never the part you were missing.

What clients actually ask for

A client asked recently what their team needed. They had gone away and consulted colleagues first, which is more than most do, and came back with three things.

Recognising when someone, a colleague or a customer, is overwhelmed in a very busy environment.

Recognising when a member of the public is reacting badly to something and needs help.

Looking after your own mental health before it keeps you off work.

They believed these were specific to them. Every one of them is already in the course, and not as an addition. Noticing that someone is struggling, responding well when they are, and seeing it in yourself before you end up signed off, that is First Aid for Mental Health. There is no version of the course that leaves those out, and no client who doesn’t need them.

Construction says it loudest

The industry that insists on this hardest is construction. You need to understand our industry. It has its own culture, its own pressures, you won’t get it.

I would argue the opposite. What a construction worker needs from the person standing next to them is what everybody needs. Someone who notices they’ve gone quiet. Someone who asks, and then waits for the answer. Someone who doesn’t panic when the answer is a bad one.

The site is different. The hours are different. The risk of being seen as weak is probably higher. None of that changes what the response is. It changes the room you do it in, and you already know the room.

You know your environment. That was never the missing piece.

This is the part that gets turned around the wrong way. Clients assume the trainer has to supply knowledge of their world. We can’t, we don’t need to, and it isn’t what’s missing.

What’s missing is the other half. What to do when the person in front of you is struggling. That has to be taught, and it travels everywhere, because people are not industry-specific. The things learners tell us afterwards come from every sector we work in and they say the same things back.

So the work isn’t building a different course. It’s giving people the understanding, then supporting them to apply it where they actually work, with their examples, their pressures, their shifts. That happens in every course we run. It isn’t an extra and it doesn’t need asking for.

Why does this keep coming up?

Here is the part worth sitting with.

When a team believes that noticing distress in a busy workplace is a specialist skill unique to their building, it usually means nobody has ever taught them anything about it. No customer service training. Nothing on what to do when a member of the public is upset. Nothing on their own limits.

So they look at a very ordinary human situation and reasonably decide it must need an expert in their sector, because nobody has ever named it as something a person can simply learn.

That isn’t a failing of the people asking. It’s a measure of how little most employers put into any of this before something goes wrong. One of our learners called burnout “a killer”, and she was describing a workplace, not an industry.

You don’t need someone who understands your industry. You need someone who has been taught what to do when the person in front of them is struggling. Most workplaces have never got round to teaching anyone that, and no amount of sector knowledge makes up for it.

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