What the law actually asks for
The training obligation in the POSH Act runs to the employer, not to any individual trainer. Section 19 requires the employer to organise awareness programmes and to conduct orientation and induction workshops for members of the Internal Committee at regular intervals. It says nothing about who is permitted to run them, and it creates no licensing or certification regime for the person standing in front of the room. There is no statutory register of approved trainers, no government-administered exam, and no roll number issued by any ministry to a trainer.
That gap is not an oversight. The Act regulates outcomes an employer must deliver — an Internal Committee that exists on paper by written order, workshops that actually happen, a report filed on time — and leaves the market to work out who is competent to deliver the training component. Which means the word "certified" on a trainer's profile is doing no legal work at all. It is a private claim, and it has to be checked as one.
What the MWCD Handbook is — and is not
The Ministry of Women and Child Development published a Handbook on Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace in November 2015. It is a guidance document: it walks through the Act section by section, sets out a model Internal Committee process, and includes sample forms an employer can adapt. It has been widely used as a reference by employers, ICs, and trainers alike, and a course that draws on it responsibly is not doing anything wrong.
What the Handbook is not is a training curriculum administered by government, an examination, or a source of credentials. Nobody sits a government test on the Handbook and receives a certificate from the Ministry for passing it. A trainer can legitimately say their course is "based on the MWCD Handbook" — that is a true statement about source material. It is a different statement, and not a true one, to imply that basing a course on a government publication makes the resulting certificate itself government-issued. The Handbook lends content. It does not lend authority.
The private certification landscape
Because no statutory scheme exists, every POSH trainer certification you will encounter is a private one — issued by a training company, a law firm, an individual consultant, or a body like ours. Some of these are built on real legal depth and real facilitation experience; some are marketing documents with a seal on them and very little behind the seal. Because none of them carry government backing, you cannot read the difference off the certificate. You have to check it directly: who wrote the syllabus, who assessed the trainer against it, and whether the assessor has actually sat with an Internal Committee through a live inquiry, or only ever delivered the awareness session.
What actually matters when you evaluate a trainer
Legal depth
Ask to see the syllabus before you book. Does it track the statute — the Internal Committee's composition under s.4, the complaint window under s.9, the 90-day inquiry limit under s.11, the employer's 60-day action window under s.13, the awareness obligation under s.19, the annual report under s.21 — or does it stay at the level of generic sensitivity content with the section numbers left out?
IC-facilitation experience
Has the trainer, or the firm they belong to, sat with an Internal Committee through an actual inquiry — drafting notices, applying natural justice, writing findings — or is their experience limited to delivering the workshop itself? Running a good awareness session and facilitating a live inquiry draw on different, only partly overlapping, skills. Ask which one the trainer has actually done.
Language and delivery format
Confirm, in writing rather than in a brochure, the language the session will run in, the delivery mode, the duration, and the group size.
Willingness to be verified
A trainer confident in their own credentials will have no difficulty letting you contact the body that assessed them, letting you see the syllabus in advance, or naming the specific individual who will run your session. Reluctance to do any of that is itself an answer.
How to verify a trainer's claim
Before booking, ask for four things in writing: the name of the certifying body; the syllabus or assessment criteria that body used; a roll or enrolment number where one genuinely applies — an advocate's Bar enrolment number is independently checkable, for instance; and a way to contact the certifying body directly to confirm the certificate is real. A trainer who cannot produce any of these on request is not verifiable, whatever the certificate itself says.
How we handle this for our own panel
Talent Crafters trains under the NIST framework (National Institute of Skills Training); our trainers hold the NIST mark. We do not describe that mark as a government or statutory credential, because no such credential exists for this work — and we hold it to the same test we're asking you to apply to everyone else: who assessed it, against what syllabus, and how to confirm it independently. That is what verification means to us, and it's checkable rather than asserted.