Inside the HR and L&D technology market
I'm Jamie Thomson, and I've spent 25 years in HR and L&D, including senior roles at EdApp (now part of SafetyCulture), Degreed, GP Strategies, Capita and Babcock. That covers the authoring end, the platform end and the delivery end of the market, through the shift from classroom-replacement e-learning to mobile microlearning to whatever the current generation of AI tooling turns out to be.
Across those roles, the work reached global organisations including Coca-Cola, Airbus, BMW, Hilton, Yum!, Bank of America and Plan International. Those are engagements delivered while employed by the companies named above, not direct clients of QuikA Consulting, and the distinction matters: what carries over is the deep, structural experience of how learning technology behaves inside organisations of that size, not a transferable client list.
It is also the background behind my standing seat on The HR World's AI and Technology expert panel, which keeps my reading of this market current rather than retrospective, and which this page comes back to below.
What I help you deliver
My engagements span the full lifecycle of HR and L&D technology, from evaluation to custom build and workforce integration:
- Tech Stack Selection & Vendor Audits: Evaluating LMS, LXP and talent ecosystem shortlist platforms against your architecture, security requirements and actual integration capabilities, rather than sales pitch decks.
- AI Tooling & Automation Integration: Auditing existing systems to identify where native or third-party AI can automate content creation, skills mapping or administrative workflows without incurring unnecessary software costs.
- Legacy Library Migration & Orientation: Structuring, tagging and migrating large-scale legacy learning content into modern, searchable formats while preserving taxonomies and data integrity.
- Custom & White-Label App Development: Building tailored mobile or web applications, including native iOS and Android apps, to deliver custom HR or workforce development experiences under your own branding.
- Workforce Insights & Analytics: Connecting disparate HR systems to create clear, actionable dashboards for tracking skill gaps, completion performance and capability development across enterprise teams.
- Executive & Team Workshops: Conducting practical, hands-on sessions for HR, L&D and procurement leadership on AI adoption, software capability assessments and realistic roll-out strategies.
Why does that background change the advice?
Because most HR and L&D technology advice comes from one of two places, and both have a fundamental problem:
- Vendors advise on their own products, which is sales, not advice.
- Procurement consultants advise from feature checklists supplied by those vendors, which is surface-level evaluation. That is precisely why integration failures, data-silo issues and adoption bottlenecks turn up months later after the contract is already signed.
I've spent much of my career on the supplier and build side of this market, so the questions I ask are entirely different:
- What is the platform's actual underlying data model?
- What will its API really do (and what requires custom middleware)?
- How does the authoring environment degrade when scaled across hundreds of creators?
- What does implementation cost once your legacy content library and taxonomy have to move?
- Which parts of the sales demo are standard vs heavily configured edge cases?
These questions are answerable before you commit budget, not after.
The HR World panel
I am an AI and Technology Expert Panellist for The HR World, a standing obligation to analyse this market critically and articulate defensible, reality-based perspectives in public.
What feeds directly back into client work is practical filtering:
- Which categories of HR and AI tools are genuinely transformational?
- Which are light wrappers over systems you already pay for?
- What does a realistic adoption benchmark look like compared to a vendor pitch deck?
How the service works
The offer remains straightforward: there is no separate HR practice, no convoluted process and no bloated rate card. Engagement runs through clear execution phases, fully detailed on the How We Work page. What I bring is 25 years in HR and L&D behind every recommendation, and absolute certainty that nobody is paying behind the scenes for the advice you receive.
Book a free scoping call
A call with no fee and no sales deck. Share what you are aiming to achieve and where current technology is holding you back, and you will receive an honest evaluation of what is achievable, the timeline required, and the expected commercial value. If a project is not worth undertaking, I will tell you directly.