From the Mainstage to Your Campus: Custodial Guidelines Training Is Here
The highlight of the “What’s New at APPA” mainstage presentation was the launch of two new online, on-demand courses developed to support custodial teams across the educational facilities management community. The new APPA Custodial Fundamentals and APPA Custodial Management & Leadership courses are the first training programs built from the ground up based on APPA’s Custodial Guidelines. And if you weren’t in the room at the conference, we want to make sure you don’t miss this announcement.
We set out to solve a common problem across educational facilities: everyone wants a clean facility (custodians, supervisors, and leadership), but without a shared custodial standard, everyone is left guessing what “clean” really means. APPA’s Custodial Guidelines define five levels of facility cleanliness, including what each level looks like and the staffing required to achieve consistent results. These new online courses bring APPA’s Guidelines to life, so expectations are clear, measurable, and defensible. With both a frontline custodial course as well as a supervisory course included, APPA’s Custodial Guidelines Training can provide standardized custodial training across your team on day one. For institutions with mature training programs, these courses add the professional framework that makes local SOPs and onboarding more effective.
Course 1, APPA Custodial Fundamentals, speaks directly to frontline custodians and cleaning professionals. Across eleven video modules, it covers the custodial role in student success, the five APPA service levels, cleaning validation, PPE and chemical safety, high-performance team cleaning, specialist procedures, and safety fundamentals. The course closes with the idea that anchors the whole program: ownership. Our custodians aren’t just cleaning buildings. They’re guardians of every space and everyone in it.
Course 2, APPA Custodial Management & Leadership, equips supervisors, managers, and lead custodians with the operational toolkit behind the standard: the APPA evaluation framework, space inventory, workloading and FTE calculations, standard operating procedures, inspection data, staffing for leave and non-cleaning duties, benchmarking with APPA’s Facilities Performance Indicators, contracting options, and green cleaning. In short, this course teaches your leaders how to turn quality into numbers that can be used to justify staffing, make budget decisions, and inform others in your institution.
Both courses were built on APPA’s Operational Guidelines for Educational Facilities: Custodial, Fourth Edition—the industry benchmark developed over decades by experts across our community. Every module is a narrated video with captions, followed by a knowledge check; learners must score 80% or higher to advance, and each completed course earns an APPA certificate. This means that each certificate your team earns represents verified learning, not just seat time. You’ll have a documented training record for every member of your staff. Prefer to have your leaders deliver the content? Each module also includes presenter notes and a discussion prompt, so supervisors can walk through modules live in team meetings and connect every lesson back to your own campus.
To be clear, this program is not a replacement for your institution’s SOPs, onboarding, or site-specific protocols. Instead, it helps supplement and standardize your custodial training while providing the “what” and “why” behind professional custodial operations. At APPA, we believe that developed people stay and trained teams perform. Investing in your custodial team is a retention strategy, a quality strategy, and a culture strategy all in one.
Both courses are available now, and the pricing model is simple: one subscription includes both courses. Institutional subscriptions cover your entire custodial staff with unlimited seats, so everyone on your team trains on the same standard. If you’d rather start small, single seats are available for APPA members and non-members alike—this is a great way to preview the program yourself or pilot it with a member of your team. Launch pricing is in effect now through December 31, 2026, with savings of up to 50% on your first year. Spanish-language editions of both courses are coming soon.
And this is just the beginning. The same program model is coming to APPA’s Grounds and Maintenance Operational Guidelines, with new course tracks already in development.
Explore the full curriculum, watch a two-minute overview, and subscribe.
View Curriculum
Questions? Email professionaldevelopment@appa.org.