There are plenty of good reasons to conduct regular SR&ED awareness training sessions. But everybody needs to know the same things.
It helps your SR&ED program if you teach the key stakeholders something about the information or response that you need, and why that information or that response matters. If you’re going to deliver such training effectively, though, you need to broaden the scope of who you’re training, and to narrow the scope of what each training set should include. There are specific things that it is vital for a Vendor Manager or a Project Manager to know, for instance. Their training should include those things. The same goes for Senior Leadership, or the financial folks, or Human Resources. Tailor the training to your stakeholders to get better results.
When I first started to develop and deliver SR&ED awareness training, I developed a one-size-fits-all training deck that included topics from both the technical and costing sides of the SR&ED program. I delivered that training to anyone and everyone who wanted a SR&ED briefing (or who was forced to sit through it). The problem was that, at any given session, approximately half of the content was irrelevant to some of my audience.
I could tell by the glazing of their eyes and their diminishing engagement when some of the participants began “tuning out”, because they had nothing to do with the issues I was discussing. This was due to my own flawed assumptions – I was assuming that the information was as necessary to them as it was to me.
It wasn’t. Nobody in the room was seeking to become a SR&ED expert. They just wanted to learn how to recognize the kind of work that might qualify, and to understand what their obligations and tasks were should they find themselves in a project where a SR&ED claim was possible. (Just tell me what I need to DO, they were pleading silently … and I let them down.)