I saw this on the cover of a brochure that my wife got recently.

Problem:
“Trainings” is not a word.

Explanation:
“Professional Trainings: 2008-2009” was the full title of the brochure from a “Training Institute for Improved Health”.

The brochure described various educational sessions to be presented by the Institute.

The word “training” as a noun means the instruction or education of a person who is being trained.

Given that the nouns “instruction” and “education” have no plural form, the noun “training” has no plural form, and therefore “trainings” is not a word.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks, to prevent variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “training” — 725,000,000 matches
• “trainings” — 13,700,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 52.9:1, which is good, but the fact that the Web contains nearly fourteen million instances of “trainings” is outrageous!

It is also clear that erroneous pluralization of the noun “training” is definitely a common English blunder.

For fun, I also searched Google for each of the following phrases (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “professional training” — 5,190,000 matches
• “professional trainings” — 47,700 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the phrase correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 109:1, which is much better, especially when one notices that “trainings” returned about fourteen million matches but that “professional trainings” returned fewer than fifty thousand matches.

I suppose that this says that most professionals know that “trainings” is not a word!

Solution:
“Professional Training”