Questions to ask a learning and development vendor

The question this category has to survive

Learning and development is the most exposed People occupation in the report, and generating content is most of what is already reachable without buying anything. Start there and let the answer sit.

1. What does this do that I could not do with a chat window and an afternoon?

   Ask it first. If the answer is making courses faster, you are being sold something you have. The good answers are about assignment at scale, evidence, accessibility and proving the training happened.

   Worry ifA course generated live from a prompt, presented as the product.

2. Assign a compliance course to your demo population, set a deadline, and show me the chasing that happens without anybody doing it.

   Compliance training is why most organisations buy one of these, and the chasing is the work. Ask what happens at the deadline and what a manager sees.

3. Show me a course that renews every twelve months handling that on its own, including somebody who joined mid-cycle.

   Recurring certification is where spreadsheets go wrong and where a system earns its money.

4. Show me the learner view on a phone, and tell me what happens with no signal.

   Many of the people who most need this work in a warehouse, a ward or a van. If it needs a laptop, half your audience completes nothing.

5. Show me how you tell us whether the training worked, beyond completion rates.

   Evaluating programme effectiveness is the part of this job that genuinely needs software. Completion is attendance, not effect.

6. A manager wants to know where their team is up to. Show me their view.

   Managers are the ones who make completion happen. If the only way to see a team is a report somebody in HR runs and emails out, the chasing stays with HR.

The two questions that get honest answers

Ask these at the end, when the demo is over and the room has relaxed. They are worth more than the previous hour.

1. Which of the things you showed me today are live for every customer, and which are on the roadmap?

   The most common complaint from buyers in this market is feeling misled afterwards, with promised features never arriving. Ask in the room, write the answer down, and put anything you are depending on into the contract with a date against it.

   Worry ifAnything demonstrated in an environment no customer is on yet.

2. What are the three things your customers complain about most?

   A good salesperson answers honestly, because they know you will find out in month two. "Nothing really" means either they do not talk to their customers or they will not tell you.

   Worry ifA strength dressed up as a weakness.

Drive it yourself

1. Import a SCORM package we already own.

   Most buyers arrive with existing content and a supplier or two. If import is fiddly or chargeable, the migration cost is bigger than the licence, and this is the one thing you can only learn by doing it.

2. Build one short course ourselves, of the kind we actually make.

   Authoring tools demo beautifully and vary enormously once you use them. An hour building something real tells you whether your team will keep using it or go back to slides.

3. Pull completion data for a pretend audit: per person, per course, with dates, into a spreadsheet.

   Proving something happened is the main reason this gets bought. Check the export yourself before you look at the catalogue.

Getting a sandbox at all

1. Can we have a sandbox for two weeks with our own test data, without a sales process attached?

   Everything you learn in a demo is about their product being used the way they use it. A fortnight with your own made-up data tells you whether your team can use it. A vendor confident in the product hands one over.

   Worry ifA trial only available after a commercial conversation, or a guided tour rather than an account.

2. Set up one thing we would need on day one, ourselves, while you watch.

   Pick something ordinary: a workflow step, an approval, a template. If it needs the vendor, then every change for the next three years needs the vendor, and nobody put that in the quote.

   Worry ifConfiguration that turns out to be a professional services ticket.

Ask a customer

1. What is your completion rate on a course nobody is forced to do?

   Mandatory completion measures chasing. Voluntary completion measures whether the thing is any good, and only a customer has that number.

2. How much of the content library do you actually use?

   Libraries are priced on breadth and used on depth. A customer using forty courses out of six thousand tells you what you are really buying.

3. Which parts of the business never adopted it, and why?

   There is usually a population, often frontline or field-based, where it never took. Finding out whether it was the phone experience, the login or the content is worth more than any feature list.

Worth asking any customer, in any category

Ask the vendor for two customers your size, then ask each for a screen share. These four are for that call, with the vendor not on the line.

1. How long did implementation actually take, against what you were told?

   The most useful number in the whole process, and the vendor will quote you their fastest. A customer will tell you what it cost in their own team's time, which never appears in any quote.

2. What did you assume it did that it turned out not to do?

   Everybody has one. It is usually a reporting gap or an integration that needed building, and it is the thing you would otherwise find in month three.

3. What happened the last time you raised something serious with support?

   Support quality tends to drop once a contract is signed, and a reference customer is a year past that point. Ask for a specific incident rather than an opinion.

Content, licensing and cost

1. Is the content library included or licensed separately, and what happens to its price at renewal?

   The platform and the library are usually two purchases wearing one name, and the library is the one that goes up.

2. Are we charged per learner, per active user, or per employee?

   Per active user sounds generous and gets expensive the moment a compliance push lands. Model the month you assign something to everybody.

3. If we leave, do we keep the courses we built, and in what format?

   Content built in a proprietary authoring tool tends to leave as a video file or not at all. Ask about SCORM or xAPI export specifically, and get it into the contract.

   Worry ifCourses that only work inside their player.

4. Which of your own content meets WCAG 2.2 AA, and who checked it?

   You are responsible for training being accessible to your employees. A vendor who has audited their library says so quickly and names the standard.

5. Where does the list of employees come from, and what happens when somebody changes team or leaves?

   If the user list is maintained by hand it will be wrong within a month, and every compliance report after that is wrong too.

What it costs, all in

Implementation, migration, integrations and support tiers are where the quoted price stops being the price. Ask for the total before the demo ends.

1. What does year one cost in total, in writing, including implementation, migration and integration fees?

   The licence figure is rarely the bill. Implementation, data migration, API charges, premium support and mid-term true-ups are all common and all appear after signature. A vendor who will put the year-one total in an email can be held to it.

   Worry ifA licence price now and implementation "scoped later".

2. Is implementation a fixed fee or time and materials?

   Fixed fee puts the risk of a slow implementation on the people running it. Time and materials puts it on you, and HR data is always messier than anyone expects.

   Worry ifDay rates with no cap.

3. What is the renewal price, and is the increase capped in the contract?

   Year-one discounts often disappear at renewal, which turns a good deal into an expensive one two years in. A cap written into the contract is a normal thing to ask for.

   Worry ifUplift "in line with the market".

4. What notice do we give to leave, and does it renew automatically?

   Thirty to sixty days is reasonable. Ninety or more with auto-renewal means one missed diary entry costs another full year. Ask for the clause and read it in the room.

   Worry ifNinety days or more, auto-renewing, multi-year.

5. On the day we leave, what do we get, in what format, and at what cost? Is that in the contract?

   You want every record you put in, plus anything the system generated about your people, in CSV or JSON, at no charge. A feature can change in a release note. A clause cannot, and this one costs nothing to ask for at the point of buying.

   Worry ifA PDF export, a fee, or access cut off before the export arrives.

Data protection and security

1. For each thing this system does, are you controller or processor, and is the data processing agreement attached to the contract?

   The roles have to be settled activity by activity rather than once for the whole product, and the ICO expects a contract that says so. If they are a processor you have to give explicit written instructions, so ask what those will say.

   Worry ifHesitation, or "we are the processor" as a blanket answer.

   ICO, six questions to ask when procuring AI recruitment tools, November 2024

2. Where is the data hosted, which sub-processors touch it, and how do we hear when that list changes?

   Employee data includes salaries, health information and grievances. You need to know who holds it and to have a route to object when a new sub-processor appears.

3. Do you train any model on our data? Is it off by default, and is that in the contract?

   Ask plainly and get it in writing. "We do not sell your data" is a different sentence and is often the one that comes back.

   Worry ifAn answer about anonymisation that never says no.

4. Send us your most recent penetration test summary and your ISO 27001 certificate or SOC 2 report.

   A certificate number is easy to claim and easy to check. The pen test summary tells you whether anything serious was found and how fast it closed.

   Worry if"Available under NDA once we have progressed further."

5. When an employee makes a subject access request touching your system, what do we get from you and how quickly?

   You have a statutory deadline and the vendor does not. Ask for their internal service level in days and check it leaves you time to review before you answer.