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Kota Kinabalu: Sabah hosted the world’s first live Certified Trusted Advisor (CTA) programme, reinforcing its emergence as a serious player in the global Business Events (BE) industry.

Event Design Collective Global Co-Founder cum Managing Director Ruud Janssen said the CTA programme evolved from the Event Design Certificate (EDC) programme, and has only been available online since October last year.

“When Dr Rosmawati Lasuki invited us to host the EDC Level 3 programme in Sabah the year before, we were met with such enthusiasm and excitement from the participants which inspired her to bring us back this year to host the CTA programme.

“As a result, the first cohort of 17 future certified trusted advisors attended a three-day live session, which will be followed by six months of coaching and continued engagement,” he told Daily Express after the programme’s closing cum graduation ceremony on Wednesday.

Janssen, who is also one of the trainers, described CTA as a programme designed for “practitioners of change” – individuals responsible for driving transformation within organisations or within themselves. He noted that as global and organizational environments evolve rapidly, individuals need to continually reinvent and refine themselves to keep pace and perform effectively.

“Without self-transformation, professionals cannot effectively adapt to or lead evolving organisations.

“The programme was originally created because event design practitioners, though passionate and knowledgeable about the Event Canvas methodology, often struggled to communicate its relevance to organisational stakeholders,” he explained.

The CTA programme was therefore developed to equip participants with high-performance skills and the ability to strategically quit outdated practices in order to embrace new ones.

Janssen also confirmed strong ambitions to establish a Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Sabah, both from the Sabah International Convention Centre (SICC) and at their destination level, which would serve as a dedicated space for designing forward-looking events and deploying newly developed tools in collaboration with local organisers.

“From the strong impact we’ve observed from this first CTA cohort, more sessions are likely to follow,” he said.

When asked about his hopes for BE in Sabah, he described the event as a celebration of local capabilities as well as a catalyst for change.

He emphasised that events serve as “artifacts of change” and reflect an organisation’s culture. Even with Sabah’s relatively young event culture, it has managed to achieve world-class standards in just five years.

“Sustaining this growth over the next five years and beyond will be a critical success factor, so the Event Design Collective, as an organisation, is happy to continue partnering with SICC to make the future a success,” he said.

Meanwhile, EDC Mastermind and CTA programme trainer Marie-France Watson expressed strong optimism about tangible results emerging within six months to a year, with visible manifestations potentially seen at BE in Sabah in 2027.

“I see immense potential among today’s participants. The ideas and elements are already present, what they needed were the framework and tools to implement them,” she said.

Agrippa Consulting International President Paul Rulkens highlighted the participants’ strong willingness to learn, absorb, adopt and test new ideas – an essential mindset for organisations seeking growth and improvement.

Paul, who is one of the programme trainers, also described the training environment as open, transparent and human-centred, fostering both conceptual growth and personal development. A key focus of the programme was identifying what must be taken out in order to raise standards and move to the next level.

“Sabah, in pursuing its growth vision, should consider what limiting factors need to be removed to unlock further potential,” he suggested.

When asked about the future of the programme, Janssen explained that the Event Design Collective follows a design mindset centred on experimentation, iteration and incremental improvement.

“This first live edition of the CTA programme — following five previous editions of the Mastermind Programme — has served as a strong motivator to gather people around the practice of trusted advisory and high performance,” he said.

He said that their next probable location would be Singapore, which is also progressing towards developing the Trusted Advisor skillset as well.