Five questions to ask before enrolling in a battery training programme

The battery training market in 2026 is noisy. Free MOOCs, vendor certifications, university certificates, online cohort programmes, and most of them describe themselves with the same three adjectives. Before you pay for any of them (including ours), here are the five questions we wish more applicants asked us.

1. Who is teaching, and what caliber of practitioner?

Recorded content is cheap to produce. Live sessions taught by people currently doing the work are not. Full lecturer line-ups often firm up close to a cohort (people run real jobs and calendars shift), so a named list six months out is unrealistic. What you can ask for is the caliber and profile of the faculty: which companies they come from, what seniority, and how many are practitioners versus academics. Ask to see the previous cohort's lecturer list as a proxy. If a programme cannot describe the caliber of who teaches, that itself is the answer.

2. What does the cohort look like?

Half the value of a good programme is the people in the cohort. Ask for the role mix, the country mix, and how many people are currently in jobs you would consider moving into. If the programme cannot describe its own cohort, it does not know its product.

3. What happens between live sessions?

The hours you spend on your own, reading, working on the case study, talking to peers, are where learning actually compounds. Ask what is structured, what is optional, and what the realistic weekly time commitment looks like for someone with a full-time job.

4. What is the certification worth?

CPD-accredited, university-issued, vendor-issued, programme-issued, these are not the same thing. Ask the programme to name the issuing body and what its recognition actually is. 'Industry-recognised' is not an answer.

5. What happens after the programme ends?

A good programme should have a real alumni network and concrete examples of how people use it, referrals, second opinions, collaboration on tenders. Ask for three examples. If the answer is a private Slack workspace and a LinkedIn group, weight that appropriately.

We answer all five for BatteryMBA on the 15-minute overview call. If you ask another programme the same questions and the answers are sharper than ours, you should enrol there instead, and tell us what we are missing.