Training built around your stack, not a generic deck.
Upskilling for commercial, marketing and operations teams. We write the curriculum after we have seen how your team actually works, deliver it ourselves, and hand over the trainer guide so the next intake does not cost you again.
If your team needs one specific tool taught and nothing else, a one-day specialist will beat us on price and we will tell you so.
What the engagement gives you. The programme figures behind it — people trained, hours delivered, modules written — sit with the client work below, where they evidence the capability instead of opening with our own output.
Four costs of off-the-shelf training.
It is not about your business
A course written for everyone uses examples from none of your categories. Your team spends the session translating a retail example into their own work, which is the work the training was supposed to do.
You pay again for every intake
Nothing is left behind, so the second cohort costs what the first one did, and the fifth costs the same as the second.
One language only
In this region that quietly excludes part of the team, or forces them to learn in a second language while their colleagues learn in a first.
No evidence it worked
Attendance gets reported because attendance is easy to count. Nobody measures whether the thing the training was for is now happening.
Six tracks, all of them taught to a live cohort.
These are lifted from curricula that already ran — the thirteen-session Masar 3500 programme and the thirteen bilingual modules written for SPARK. Nothing here was drafted for this page.
01Selling online, end to end
Catalogue, pricing, checkout, fulfilment and returns as one chain rather than five departments. The core of the Masar 3500 curriculum, taught to people who had never sold anything online.
02Product content that converts
Writing descriptions and listings that answer the question a buyer actually has, including where AI tools help and where they produce filler.
03Product photography and presentation
What a product photograph has to show, shot on the equipment your team already owns rather than a studio you will not book twice.
04Digital marketing that is measured
Channels, budgets and the two or three numbers worth reporting, taught against your own account rather than a demo one.
05Operations, orders and shipping
Order management, stock and delivery — the unglamorous half where margin is usually lost.
06Customer service and retention
Response standards, the awkward conversations, and what to do when the answer is that the customer is right.
AI has its own page rather than a slot in this list, because buyers look for it by name. AI Skills for Business & Teams
The guide outlives the day in the room.
A training day is an event. A trainer guide is an asset, and it is the reason a programme can keep running in a country the trainer has left.
The script, the exercises, the questions people actually ask, and what to do when somebody gets it wrong — written for a trainer who was not there when we built it.
On Masar 3500 the trainer guide reached version nineteen and the trainee guide version twelve, alongside a technical guide, bilingual session outlines and two training videos. Those version numbers are the interesting part: each one is a cohort that found something wrong.
No licence, no per-seat fee, no renewal. Run it for the next intake with your own team lead.
Plotted against the alternatives.
Competitors sit at the bottom of their published range and we sit at the top of ours, which is the least flattering way to draw this.
| Option | Year one | Year two | Bilingual |
|---|---|---|---|
| A per-seat course library | From ~$15 per user per month | The same again | Subtitles, usually |
| A regional training provider | From ~$4,000 per day | The same again per cohort | One language per trainer |
| Umbrella500, six tracks | Up to ~$14,000, fixed | $0 — you run it from the guide | Arabic and English, both written |
Sources: published per-seat pricing for the major course libraries and published day rates for regional corporate training providers. We will put your real numbers into this table on the call, including the ones that do not favour us.
Eight weeks, and nothing is written until week two.
The riskiest assumption is that we know what your team needs. So that is the part we test first, before anything is committed.
- Week 1
Sit with the team
Short sessions with the people who will be trained and the person who asked for the training. Those two answers are rarely the same, and the gap is the brief.
- Weeks 2–4
Write the curriculum
Tracks, exercises and examples from your own catalogue and accounts. You approve the outline before any session is scheduled.
- Weeks 5–7
Deliver it
Delivered by Saleem Najjar and Noora Shanak in Arabic or English, in groups small enough that everybody works rather than watches.
- Week 8
Hand it over
Trainer guide, trainee guide and exercises, plus a session with whoever will run the next intake.
Curricula that had to work without us.
Four thousand one hundred families, across a country we could not be in every week. The training had to survive being delivered by somebody else, which is why the guide matters more than the day.
Three times we are the wrong choice.
You need compliance training
Regulated content with a certificate at the end is a specialist trade with its own liability. Not ours.
You want one tool taught
If the whole need is a single platform, its own vendor will train your team better and usually free.
You want it delivered next week
We will not skip the first two weeks. A curriculum written without seeing the team is the thing this page is arguing against.
Said plainly: this practice was built delivering national programmes for development clients. The teaching, the curriculum design and the handover are the same craft at a company, but the client names on our list are development ones, and we would rather you heard that here than found it out later.
Counted from three named programmes — the World Bank in Jordan, Masar 3500 in Saudi Arabia and SPARK in Türkiye. These are development programmes. Our corporate track record is short, which is the honest shape of it — the skill being sold is the teaching.
The ones that decide it.
Arabic or English?
Both, and both written rather than translated on the day. The SPARK curriculum was thirteen bilingual modules, so this is something we have already delivered.
Who delivers the sessions?
Saleem Najjar and Noora Shanak. The people on the first call are the people in the room.
How big can a group be?
Small enough that everyone works on their own task. Past about twelve it becomes a lecture, and lectures are what this page is against.
Do we really own the material?
Yes. Trainer guide, trainee guide and exercises, with no licence and no per-seat fee. Running it again yourself is the intended outcome.
Can you train our trainers instead?
That is often the better buy. We build the curriculum, run one cohort with your trainer in the room, then hand over.
How do you measure it?
We agree the measure before we start, and it is never attendance. On Masar 3500 it was live storefronts; for a commercial team it is usually a number the team already reports.
What if the team already had training that failed?
Tell us on the call what it was. Knowing what did not land is the most useful input into the week-one sessions.
Tell us which team, and what should change.
Two sentences is enough to start. We will tell you on the call whether this is a curriculum, a single course, or something you should not buy at all.
Write directly: saleem.najjar@umbrella500.com
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