Your Chief Virtual Learning Architect

Learning to Performance

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Custom Design & Delivery

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Predictive Evaluation

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Enterprise Learning Strategy

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Dave Basarab Consulting has elevated the training experience, offering an end-to-end comprehensive approach that includes training strategy, instructional design, development, delivery , post program training transfer, and evaluation (via the unique Predictive Evaluation methodology). Virtual Chief Architect Dave Basarab has combined all of these individual training elements with his user-friendly, comprehensive Learning to Performance approach, which significantly increases companies' training ROI.

Why we are different

Innovation: Our primary focus is creating learning programs using a Learning to Performance approach.
Expertise: Dave offers the depth and breadth of his experience, including working internally at prestigious companies (Motorola, Ingersoll Rand and Pitney Bowes) as well as his knowledge and expertise as a highly-respected, sought-after consultant.
Partnership: Basarab collaborates with companies, serving as their own Chief Learning Officer whenever they need to plan, strategize, or implement training initiatives.

Training Services

Enterprise Learning Strategy

Enterprise Learning Strategy

At Dave Basarab Consulting, we're experts in creating Enterprise Learning Plans. We work with you to develop your company's learning strategy and direction.

Custom Design, Development, & Delivery

Custom Design, Development, & Delivery

Custom training is an effective way of developing the capability required to execute your strategy. We are a custom design house that creates programs specific to your business.

Learning Burst Development

Learning Burst Development

We can create and deliver your courses via our unique Learning Burst Method - keeping your employees at their jobs while receiving world-class training.

Predictive Evaluation

Predictive Evaluation

We predict the ROI for your courses and establish success gates. We then evaluate the course against the success gates to show value realized and continually improve results.

Leadership Development

Leadership Development

Turn-key virtual custom leadership development program that combines world-class leadership speakers/educators with post-event personalized coaching to provide you with a cadre of highly skilled leaders.

Predictive Evaluation

Estimating the true cost of in-house training development

When a learning lead in Sydney or Brisbane builds a budget for an internal capability program, the figure on the executive deck rarely matches what the program truly costs. Most organisations underestimate in-house training development by thirty to sixty percent, not because the maths is sloppy but because the spreadsheet misses slow-burning items: SME interviews, approvals, accessibility testing and the rework that follows a wobbly pilot. With the Fair Work Commission revising award rates each year and superannuation at twelve percent, those small omissions compound quickly.

A realistic cost model needs to move beyond courseware hours and facilitator fees. It should reflect how Australian teams actually operate — split across Melbourne CBD, Parramatta and regional Pilbara sites — and the bureaucratic layer any program touching ASQA-registered credentials attracts. Treating development as a series of predictable line items, rather than a single content fee, is the first step toward defending the spend at board level.

Decoding the line items training leads forget

Most charters begin with design hours and a facilitator block, then add a ten percent contingency and stop. Three months later the program has eaten a senior engineer's weeks, four rounds of legal review and a fresh video editing subscription. Each item is real money, yet none appear in the original figure.

Cost the work by separating development into stages: discovery, design, build, pilot, revision and rollout. Assign a dollar figure and a calendar window to each, then ask the business owner to sign off on the total. A useful sanity check is to compare your loaded internal rate against the quote a specialist partner would offer, drawing on resources such as Best Practices for Writing Custom Training Scenarios That Feel Real; the gap usually tells you whether internal capacity is genuinely cheaper.

Line items that consistently slip under the radar:

SME time paid by operations but never charged to the project
Legal, brand and accessibility review cycles that overrun
Software licence renewals triggered by adding author seats
Translation work for culturally diverse workforces in Western Sydney and the Northern Territory
Pilot facilitation, learner time and catering during the testing phase

Signals that the working estimate is realistic:

Stakeholder review windows are explicitly costed
Senior approvers sign off on the loaded labour figure
Contingency reflects the rework rate actually seen on past projects
Adoption and impact forecasts travel with the spend, not after the fact

Sourcing realistic benchmarks for the Australian market

Australian salary data is easier to find than most learning leads think. AHRI's industry salary surveys, the Hays Salary Guide and ABS labour force data give reliable day rates for instructional designers, L&D managers and learning architects across each capital city. Use these as your floor, then add the on-costs an in-house project carries: superannuation, payroll tax where applicable, workers' compensation and the overhead finance applies to a corporate seat.

For facilitator-led delivery, the relevant award under the Fair Work Act varies by audience, with most sitting in the professional and administrative stream rather than a training-specific one. Industry events run by ATEM or AITD give further signal on what comparable organisations budget per learner. Cross-check with two or three suppliers who do this work daily and the benchmark lands within a tight band.

Calculating labour using award rates and loadings

Hourly rates are where most estimates fall over, or over-engineer the case for outsourcing. A senior instructional designer in Australia typically bills between AUD $115 and $165 depending on seniority, while an L&D project manager commands $130 to $180 fully loaded. A forty-hour design sprint therefore starts around $4,600 before any content is written.

Layer in the indirect time: stakeholder interviews with line managers at a Parramatta call centre, a commute into Melbourne CBD for a co-design workshop, the formatting requests from compliance. Once those touchpoints are converted to a labour figure, they routinely push the budget past the cost of engaging a specialist firm with templates and QA in place. Many teams weighing this trade-off explore custom training design and delivery services to cap their exposure on a fixed-fee basis.

Factoring in technology, SMEs and review cycles

Software is the line item executives love to challenge and the one that quietly balloons. Authoring tools such as Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate and the newer AI-assisted platforms carry per-seat licences that scale with team size, and stock libraries plus video hosting carve into the same pool.

SME time deserves its own row: a senior operator at a Gladstone refinery or a clinician at a metropolitan hospital is paid by operations, so their contribution is a hidden cost the business absorbs either way. Two formal review cycles with legal, brand and accessibility before sign-off make the figure reflect how Australian regulators and brand houses actually behave.

Cost bucket	In-house development	Blended or outsourced partner
Discovery and SMEs	Internal salaries plus opportunity cost	Fixed discovery fee, partner-led interviews
Design and build	Loaded hourly rates and template build	Tiered day rate with existing IP library
Review and approvals	Internal legal, brand and IT effort	Partner-managed with client sign-off windows
Technology licences	Full cost paid internally	Often included or rebated
Pilot and iteration	Internal facilitation and learner time	Structured pilot with reporting

The columns above are illustrative — the real signal is how each bucket responds when scope changes. In-house teams tend to absorb creep silently, while a contracted model forces a conversation about each new request.

Pilot testing, iteration and rollout overheads

Piloting is where well-meaning programs sink. A working version goes to a sample group at a Barangaroo office, feedback floods in by email and the design team spends three weeks rebuilding activities that already worked. Each iteration cycle costs the equivalent of a small grant, and most organisations run at least three before any rollout.

For programs reaching regional Western Australia or western Queensland, pilot logistics add flights, accommodation and compressed delivery windows. Build those into the estimate up front so procurement conversations become easier. A spreadsheet or dashboard tracking actual hours against the original plan gives you the data you need next round.

Using Predictive Evaluation to defend the investment

Cost estimates lose the room when they arrive as a number with no return attached. Predictive Evaluation reframes the conversation by forecasting adoption and impact alongside the spend, so the executive reviews a benefit curve rather than a line item. That is the lens the step-by-step guide to building an enterprise learning strategy recommends for every program above a threshold dollar value.

When you can show expected adoption rates, time-to-competency and revenue influence against the all-in cost, the discussion shifts from "can we afford it?" to "how soon does it pay off?". A cost estimate that travels with adoption and impact forecasts is one that survives budget review.

Build the next estimate as a stage-by-stage model using real Australian labour rates, on-costs and a contingency that reflects past rework, and the conversation at the executive table changes from defending the figure to interrogating it.

Learning to Performance

Learning to Performance, a complete training approach, gives companies world-class training to drive significant return. This approach includes upfront work (Impact Mapping, design), training (for staff and company executives), and post-training efforts to ensure training transfer. This unique recipe - the key for successful training and adoption - is changing the way companies implement training. This methodology could work with any content for organizations in any industry.