Ready to make the switch to a Learning Platform? Here’s a ready-to-use RFP
December 11, 2019
Making the switch to a Learning Platform for the first time may seem like a step into the unknown. In an ever-evolving landscape of online learning solutions, the vast array of choice can be overwhelming.
How can you evaluate what’s out there and find the right platform to solve your business challenges and receive a great return on investment?
Reaching out to suppliers with a Request For Proposal (RFP) can help ensure you get the right information to make an informed decision about which learning platform can solve your particular challenges.
So, what to include in an RFP?
Your main objective should be to establish the key pain points that exist within your organization, and the key success metrics you will use to measure the success of the project. In other words, what problems are you trying to solve, and how will a new learning solution help you solve them?
This will challenge potential vendors to think about how their solution matches up to your specific requirements, and not just tell you about the features of their products and services. Do you need to improve the onboarding experience for your new hires, reducing the time to performance-readiness? Are you trying to improve compliance rates in your organization and reduce seat time on mandatory training? Or are you hoping to create more personal development opportunities and improve employee retention and the skills your business needs to be successful?
Whatever your goals, defining these clearly from the outset will help to ensure that you’re able to evaluate and choose the right learning solution for you.
Getting the right information
In addition to providing vendors with a good understanding of the broader context for how their solutions will help you to address your key business requirements, you will also need to break down the known requirements you have into a list. This can cover areas such as functional requirements (what do you need the platform to be able to do?), technical requirements (information security, hosting etc.), support and onboarding needs, and any other requirements you might have.
This is a simple way for your prospective suppliers to confirm whether they offer these or not, and can be distributed as part of an RFP or a Request for Information (RFI): a pre-RFP stage specifically for the purpose of gathering information from a wide range of suppliers and shortlisting.
Learning Pool’s downloadable, editable requirements sheet can be used as a guide and key component for procuring a Learning Platform. This spreadsheet should act as more than a checklist of features – it aims to challenge vendors to demonstrate how their learning solution will bring tangible value to your organization. It will give you an overview of how each solution matches up to your requirements, making it easy to see which vendor can save you time, money, and relieve your pain points.
The list we have provided is not exhaustive. You can compare the requirements with your own internal needs for various departments and stakeholders across the organization: HR, L&D, Sales and Marketing, IT, administrators, management and, not least, the end-users.
The MoSCoW rating will allow you to priortize each requirement and improve your chances of finding the right vendor by allowing more flexibility.
You can combine this spreadsheet with an information document outlining any background information, your key business challenges, success metrics, and instructions for completing and submitting the response, along with any other relevant information. These may be attached along with other documentation relevant to your RFP process.
Alternatively, you may distribute the spreadsheet to a wide range of suppliers as part of an RFI exercise to quickly gather information and shortlist those who most closely meet your requirements. In this case, you might request less detailed information (such as yes/no/partial responses only), to help you evaluate the responses more efficiently.
Getting the most from a learning platform
Learning Pool Platform is a workplace learning solution that can help you across your complete employee lifecycle.
Onboarding – Turn new hires into extraordinary performers with onboarding that minimizes time to mastery.
Compliance – Drive extraordinary growth through compliance training that builds trust inside and out of your company.
Upskilling – Identify the extraordinary talent in your company and develop the next generation of leaders with skills development.
Each feature of the Learning Pool Platform is developed specifically to solve a wide range of business challenges within these three areas. We have a fully agile development team and are able to respond to needs and opportunities as they arise, be that new technological innovation or shifting requirements from our customers. For example, we were immediately able to prioritize developments around virtual session bookings at the start of the pandemic, and we currently have a stream of work dedicated to generative AI opportunity following the release of the latest ChatGPT version and competing alternatives.
By aligning learning to personal goals and business objectives, we deliver extraordinary outcomes for individuals and organizations. Procuring a new learning solution goes beyond a checklist of features, and we would encourage you to challenge each vendor to demonstrate how they will solve your unique challenges and guarantee a great return on investment.
Making the switch to Learning Pool Platform
Companies now face unprecedented change. To keep up, you need a learning solution that will get your people performance-ready through personalized and purposeful learning.
We believe that extraordinary things happen when companies invest in their people. RFPs are a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff and find the right learning solution to fit the needs of your organization and bring about transformative change.
Our comprehensive learning platform delivers personalized experiences at scale by applying insights into who a learner is, what they know, and what they need to learn in real-time. The result is more effective training and a team that’s ready to take on the challenges of today and tomorrow. By making learning experiences relevant to each individual and connecting learning to performance, we create extraordinary learning outcomes.
Use our requirements sheet as a guide to shape your RFP and challenge vendors to show you how their platform will help make learning more effective and how they will make learning more personal and purposeful.
You can download the example RFP here.
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