By Finn Toompuu · Founder, Qualidact · Published
Anyone who has sold training to organizations recognizes the pattern. A decision-maker wants to improve performance somewhere — sales conversion, safety, leadership — and translates that into a procurement request for a named course. "We need a negotiation course." The title becomes the unit of purchase, standing in for the outcome actually wanted. This substitution is understandable, but it quietly undermines the improvement the buyer is trying to achieve.
Why buyers default to titles
Course names are easy to compare, budget, and justify upward. A title fits on a purchase order; a competency framework does not. Titles also carry reputational shorthand — "PRINCE2," "Situational Leadership" — letting a buyer feel confident without specifying what changed behavior looks like. The risk is that the organization ends up owning a credential rather than a capability: people attend, receive certificates, and the underlying performance gap remains untouched, because nobody defined what "successful" meant in terms of what participants could actually do differently afterward.
What constructive alignment offers
Constructive alignment, developed by John Biggs, starts from a different question: not "what shall we call this course?" but "what should learners be able to do when it's over, and how will we know?" It insists three elements move together as one system: intended outcomes, learning activities, and assessment tasks. If they're not aligned — if activities don't practice the outcome, or assessment doesn't measure it — the course can run smoothly and still fail to produce the change the buyer wanted.
This is the real value proposition for a procurer, even one who's never heard the term. It converts an abstract purchase ("a course") into a verifiable claim ("participants will run a difficult client conversation using this structure, observed in a role-play assessed against this rubric"). That claim can be checked. A course title cannot.
Translating the concept
Most buyers aren't curriculum designers — they're solving a business problem. The translation must happen in their vocabulary.
Start with the gap, not the solution: what can people currently not do that's costing the business something measurable? This anchors the conversation to performance, not content.
Ask for evidence, not enrollment. Push from "how many will attend" to "what will they be able to demonstrate afterward, and how will we see it?" This single question does most of constructive alignment's work without naming the theory.
Show alignment as a simple table: Outcome | Activity | Evidence. Buyers respond well because it reads as a specification sheet. An empty row — an outcome with no assessment — makes the gap visible immediately.
Finally, reframe the certificate. Attendance says someone was present; assessment says someone can perform. That distinction often shifts a buyer's thinking, exposing what they'd assumed a course title guaranteed and didn't.
The payoff
Once buyers specify outcomes and evidence instead of titles, procurement changes shape. Providers are compared on capability, not brand. And when training fails, it's diagnosable — misaligned activity, weak assessment, wrong outcome — rather than a vague verdict that prompts buying a different-sounding course next time.