When comparing personal development vendors, it is easy to conclude that they all sound rather good.
They have facilitators who engage the learner, flexible options for delivery, ways of measuring impact, and a promise of behaviour change across all corners of the globe.
All super useful, however if you’re responsible for choosing a provider for hundreds, or maybe thousands of people, it is likely you need to know a little more than these reassuring phrases.
What really matters to you is that you choose a vendor that understands exactly what your people actually need, designs it in a way that is relevant to them, and delivers it with consistency throughout the organisation. In addition to being able to provide you with evidence that something has changed as a result.
This should be your starting point.
To compare personal development vendors, assess them against four things: relevance, delivery, measurement and scalability. A good provider should be able to show how the learning fits your people, why a particular delivery method is right, how success will be measured and whether the programme can work consistently at the scale you need
It is very easy for a supplier conversation to become a tour of what they already have.
Here is the communication programme. Here is the influencing module. Here is the presentation skills workshop. Here is our platform with 400 courses already on it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that, but the question is not whether the learning exists, it is whether the learning fits the problem you are actually trying to solve.
Take influencing skills for example. One organisation may need junior employees to feel more confident challenging senior colleagues, whereas another might have people working in complex matrix structures where they regularly need to influence someone they have no authority over. Somewhere else, the problem may be highly technical people struggling to bring non-technical stakeholders with them.
All three organisations could say they need influencing training, however it is very clear that they do not need the same thing.
With this in mind, I would pay close attention to what a vendor asks you before they start recommending anything. Do they want to understand what is happening now, where people are getting stuck and what good would actually look like? Or are they simply matching your brief to something they already sell?
At Excel, our approach starts with Discover before moving through Design, Deliver, Evaluate and Embed. The point is to understand your organisation, the people, the goals and the culture before deciding what the learning should look like.
That distinction matters because relevance is not really about putting your organisation’s logo on the slides. It is about whether people can see themselves, their challenges and their working reality in the learning.
Once the problem is clear, the next question is what kind of learning experience is most likely to help.
I would be wary of any provider that appears to have one favourite format for everything. Virtual learning can be excellent, but so can in-person, as can coaching, on-demand content or a blended approach.
The interesting question is why a particular format is being recommended.
If people mainly need knowledge, preparation or something they can revisit quickly, digital content can work brilliantly. If they need to practise a difficult conversation, test their thinking, receive feedback or work through something with other people, live interaction probably matters rather more. If you are trying to change behaviour over time, one workshop may not be enough on its own.
This is where blended learning often starts to make sense, because the different parts of the programme can do different jobs. Someone might complete a short activity beforehand, attend a live session, try something back at work and then revisit the learning later with a follow-up resource or conversation.
Excel delivers learning through blended, virtual, in-person and on-demand formats, depending on what the programme needs to achieve. So rather than asking a vendor simply what delivery formats they offer, I would ask why they are recommending that particular combination for your people.
You learn a huge amount from the answer.
This is where a lot of vendor conversations become slightly less precise. Most providers can tell you who attended, many can tell you whether people enjoyed the programme, some will assess whether participants learned something.
But if the purpose of the programme is to change behaviour, you need to get beyond whether people liked it.
Suppose the programme is designed to help managers delegate more effectively. What would you actually expect to see afterwards?
Perhaps they stop holding onto every decision themselves, maybe team members are given greater ownership, maybe managers spend less time solving problems their people could solve perfectly well without them. Those are the sorts of things you can look for.
The important bit is deciding what success looks like before the programme begins, because measuring impact becomes much harder when somebody remembers to ask about it after everything has already happened.
At Excel, Evaluate sits inside the overall learning process rather than being treated as something separate at the end.
I would therefore ask any vendor how they plan to define success, what evidence they will collect and how that evidence connects back to the original reason you commissioned the programme in the first place.
You do not necessarily need an enormous measurement system. You do though need to know what you are trying to prove.
A programme can work beautifully with 20 people. Things become rather more interesting when it needs to work with 800 or 2,000… Or people across multiple countries, time zones and business units, all of whom need some level of consistency without pretending they are exactly the same.
This is where the quality of the learning matters, but so does the quality of the operation behind it.
Who is managing the facilitators? How are dates being coordinated? What happens if a region needs something slightly different? How is quality maintained across cohorts? Who is keeping track of all of this when participant numbers change, schedules move and somebody suddenly decides another 150 people need to be included?
These things are rarely the glamorous part of a pitch, however they become very glamorous indeed when nobody is managing them properly.
Excel's Learning Operations team supports programme coordination, logistics, timelines and trainers, while the wider delivery model includes a global facilitator network and worldwide operations support.
If you are buying personal development at enterprise scale, I would make operational capability part of the evaluation from the beginning. Otherwise, you may end up with an excellent programme and a very tired internal L&D team.
A scorecard is useful because it forces you to compare providers against the same things, rather than being won over by whichever pitch happens to be the slickest.
Score each area from 1 to 5, where:
| Area | What To Look For | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Relevance | How well does the vendor understand your people, culture, working environment and specific development needs? | 1–5 |
| Delivery | Can they explain why the proposed format is right for the outcome, and does it give people enough opportunity to practise and apply what they learn? | 1–5 |
| Measurement | Is there a clear plan for defining success and measuring whether behaviours actually changed? | 1–5 |
| Scalability | Can they deliver consistently across the number of people, locations, time zones and business units you need? | 1–5 |
That gives you a total score out of 20. I would not necessarily stop there though. Different programmes have different priorities, so you may want to weight the categories.
For example, if you are commissioning a highly tailored leadership programme, relevance and measurement may matter more. If you are rolling out development across several countries, scalability may deserve more weight.
A simple weighted model could look like this:
| Area | Weight | Vendor Score | Weighted Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Relevance | 30% | /5 | |
| Delivery | 25% | /5 | |
| Measurement | 25% | /5 | |
| Scalability | 20% | /5 |
The important thing is not the exact percentage. It is that you decide what matters most before the pitches start. Otherwise, there is always a risk that the provider with the best presentation ends up looking like the best partner.
By the time you are comparing final proposals, I would want a fairly clear answer to a few things.
How will you understand our organisation before designing the programme? What will participants actually do during the learning? How will the content connect to situations they face at work? What happens after the formal learning? How will you know whether behaviour changed? And what does the programme look like once it moves from a small group to the full audience?
There is one question I particularly like:
What would you change about your usual approach because of what you have learned about us?
A good answer tells you whether the vendor has actually listened. Because choosing a personal development provider is not really about finding the organisation with the longest list of capabilities. Most established providers can give you a respectable list of capabilities.
The real difference is whether they can show how those capabilities will work for your people, in your organisation, at the scale you need.
That is what you are buying
Thanks
Alex & The Excel Team