Question 1

What is PDP Quest?

Accepted Answer

PDP Quest is an AI-powered employee skills assessment and development platform. Its AI coach, Piko, writes the assessment questions, drafts each person's development plan, runs the voice interview and summarises feedback — the work a skills programme used to need a team for. Organisations use it to define the skills that matter, verify what people can actually do through short timed assessments, find where capability is missing, and run development plans against the levels people have proven rather than the ones they claim.

Question 2

Who is PDP Quest for?

Accepted Answer

HR and People teams, L&D teams, managers and the employees themselves. HR gets a capability number it can defend, L&D gets gaps located by pillar and level, managers get one-to-ones that start from evidence, and employees get a record of what they can do that they earned rather than claimed.

Question 3

How is PDP Quest different from an LMS?

Accepted Answer

A learning management system records what people were taught; PDP Quest records what they can demonstrate. The two answer different questions, and PDP Quest is the one you use to decide which training was worth buying, because a verified level before and after a course is evidence that it landed.

Question 4

How do we get started?

Accepted Answer

Book a demo, and we set up a workspace for your company on its own address — yourcompany.pdpquest.com. We recommend starting with a 90-day pilot in one department: the full product, your admin invites the people, and the skills library arrives already filled in so nobody starts from a blank taxonomy.

Question 5

How long does it take to roll out?

Accepted Answer

You are live the next working day. Sign the contract and your workspace is ready the following morning on its own address — yourcompany.pdpquest.com — with the 2,250-skill taxonomy and the catalogue of 975 job titles already in it. Inviting people is a CSV import or one email at a time. There is no implementation project to schedule and nothing to configure before the first person can sign in; a pilot can have its first verified skills inside the first week.

Question 6

How does pricing work?

Accepted Answer

One price per employee, everything included. Teams is $8 per employee per month, or $6.50 per employee per month billed annually. There is no plan matrix and no feature locked away on the things that matter — every Piko agent, analytics, reports and export are in. Enterprise is priced per contract for companies that need SSO, HRIS integrations or a custom rollout.

Question 7

What can employees do for free?

Accepted Answer

Starter, which is coming soon, is free for teams of up to 5 people: development plans written by hand, skills verified from our question bank, XP, badges, streaks and a Piko avatar for everyone. It does not include Piko's AI agents, analytics, feedback or the operations features — those are what a company pays for in Teams. Join the waitlist on the home page to hear when it opens.

Question 8

What does setup cost, and how long does it take?

Accepted Answer

Nothing, and one day. There is no implementation fee, no onboarding package and no consultant to book: you are live the next working day, on your own address, with the skills library already filled in. What you pay is the per-employee price and nothing before it.

Question 9

What is a 90-day pilot?

Accepted Answer

The full Teams product for one department for ninety days, with no annual commitment. It is the start we recommend: real people, real plans, real assessments, and a decision at the end based on what actually happened rather than a demo. Pilots are activated by us and invoiced by hand.

Question 10

Do you charge per assessment, per plan or per badge?

Accepted Answer

Never. Those are the things we want people doing more of, so they are never metered. The only thing with a limit is Piko's AI usage, which runs under a fair-use policy agreed with your company — not a per-question charge.

Question 11

Who counts as an employee?

Accepted Answer

An active account in your workspace during the month. Someone your admin deactivates stops counting at the end of that month. Admins count; guests taking a one-off quiz do not.

Question 12

How do we pay?

Accepted Answer

During pilots and for annual plans, by invoice or purchase order. Card payment for monthly Teams plans is on the roadmap once pricing has settled with the first customers; until then, there is a person at the other end of every invoice.

Question 13

Can we cancel?

Accepted Answer

A pilot simply ends. A monthly plan stops at the end of the month you cancel in. An annual plan runs to the end of its year. Your data stays available for export throughout, and is deleted on your instruction when you leave.

Question 14

How do we add people?

Accepted Answer

Invite them one at a time by email, or import a spreadsheet of people, job titles and managers. Each person receives an invitation letter and sets their own password; nobody's credentials pass through an admin.

Question 15

How do roles and permissions work?

Accepted Answer

Hierarchy, not job titles. Anyone with direct reports gets manager features for the people below them — plan creation, the review queue, and read access to their subtree — and nothing above. Company admins run the back office; access roles let you split back-office permissions between admins.

Question 16

What can a manager see?

Accepted Answer

Their own people: verified skills, plans in progress, submissions waiting for review, feedback written to them, and leave. They cannot see another manager's team, and they cannot see notes a person's other managers marked as manager-only.

Question 17

Do people get deleted when they leave?

Accepted Answer

Users are deactivated, never deleted. Their record — verified skills, completed plans, what they contributed — is part of your organisation's history.

Question 18

We have several teams and locations. Does that work?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The reporting tree can be any depth, people carry a location and country, and leave calendars know which public holidays apply where. One workspace per company; a group with genuinely separate businesses can have separate workspaces.

Question 19

How do assessments verify skill levels?

Accepted Answer

Someone answers five questions written for one specific proficiency level, and four correct verifies it. The questions are timed, the pass mark is the same for everyone in every company, and you are tested at the level you claim. Once that level is verified, the next assessment is the rung above, and climbing pays only the difference in XP.

Question 20

What does PDP Quest assess?

Accepted Answer

Skills from a taxonomy of 2,250 skills across 15 pillars, each defined at four levels from Beginner to Expert, alongside 975 job titles that each list the skills the role needs. Both ship as a starting point and your organisation edits them — rename, re-level, retire or add your own, with every change recorded.

Question 21

Can we use our own skill framework?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The standard taxonomy is editable in full, and the assessment question bank works the same way — read it, retire questions that turn out to be weak, or import your own. An assessment written for a general audience will not measure what your organisation means by a skill.

Question 22

Who writes the assessment questions?

Accepted Answer

Either the AI quiz maker, which you review, or you — questions import from CSV. Every question in the bank is labelled with which it was.

Question 23

How long does an assessment take?

Accepted Answer

Five questions on a timer you set. Most people finish inside a few minutes, which is deliberate: an assessment nobody has time for gets nobody verified.

Question 24

Can someone retake an assessment they failed?

Accepted Answer

Yes. A failed attempt verifies nothing and takes nothing away — a level someone has already proven stays proven — and they can try again. Every attempt, passed or failed, is kept, so a manager can see the history rather than only the result.

Question 25

Does PDP Quest create personal development plans?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and each plan is goals, activities and submitted evidence rather than a document. Managers review submissions in one queue, whoever manages a plan edits its goals, with every change written to the audit log, and plans target levels that are verified by assessment rather than agreed in a meeting.

Question 26

How does a plan get written?

Accepted Answer

From a conversation. A manager interviews the person — typed, or spoken and transcribed — and Piko drafts a plan of topics from it, which the manager edits before it is published. In Starter, managers write the plan themselves; the structure is the same.

Question 27

Can employees push back on their plan?

Accepted Answer

Partly. Employees rate each goal out of five, and the rating stays on the plan where their manager sees it. They do not edit the plan themselves: whoever manages it makes the change, and every change they make is written to your company's audit log. The plan also keeps a history both people can read — when it was published, each monthly review, and when it was signed off.

Question 28

What are quests and exercises?

Accepted Answer

Exercises are the practice work generated for a topic on a daily, weekly or monthly rhythm — quizzes, flashcards and scenarios. Daily and weekly ones are checked automatically; monthly scenarios go to the manager. Quests are goal-driven challenges an admin sets on top, with XP for completing them.

Question 29

What does Piko AI help with?

Accepted Answer

Drafting development plans from an interview, writing practice exercises for a topic, writing verification questions for a skill, grading scenario answers, proposing a starting skill set from a CV, running the spoken interview, and answering an admin's questions about their own company's data. Each agent is switchable off per company and every call is logged.

Question 30

Does AI decide whether someone passed?

Accepted Answer

No. AI drafts assessment questions and development plans; it never scores anyone. Scoring is four correct out of five, applied identically every time, and every agent is scoped, audited and switchable off — a level whose pass mark could shift is not evidence of anything.

Question 31

Can an AI agent decide something about a person?

Accepted Answer

No. Agents draft and summarise. Verifying a skill, approving a submission and writing a review stay with people, and the audit log records which person.

Question 32

Which AI providers are behind Piko?

Accepted Answer

Anthropic's models draft plans, exercises and questions and grade scenarios. OpenAI transcribes and voices the spoken interview and draws the avatars. Neither trains on your data; every request is a single call with a single answer, and the privacy policy names both.

Question 33

Is there a limit on AI usage?

Accepted Answer

Piko's AI is part of Teams, under a fair-use policy agreed with each company rather than a per-question charge. Each company's AI runs on keys set up for that company, so a company can also bring its own AI provider keys. The spoken interview is the most expensive part and is switched on per company.

Question 34

Can we switch Piko off?

Accepted Answer

Yes, per agent and per company, from the back office. Everything still works without him; you write the plans and questions yourself, the way Starter does.

Question 35

Is company data secure?

Accepted Answer

Every company has its own database, served from its own subdomain, so isolation is where the data lives rather than a filter. Passwords are hashed, never stored; all traffic is encrypted; sign-in is rate-limited and bot-checked; every administrative change is written to an audit trail your admins can read.

Question 36

Is our data separate from other customers?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Every company has its own database file and its own subdomain. Isolation is a property of where the data lives, not of a filter somebody remembered to write.

Question 37

Who owns the data, and who can see it?

Accepted Answer

Your company owns it. Inside the workspace, what each person sees follows the permissions your company sets. Outside it, only the providers that host, email, monitor and run the AI for the product process it, each under contract and none for their own purposes — the privacy policy lists every one.

Question 38

Where is it hosted?

Accepted Answer

The application and its databases run on Railway, behind Cloudflare. Error monitoring is in Sentry's EU region. Some AI providers process requests outside your country; where they do, we rely on their published data-protection terms and standard contractual clauses.

Question 39

Do you sign a DPA?

Accepted Answer

For Enterprise customers, yes, along with a security review and an SLA. For Teams customers the privacy policy sets out the same processing terms; ask us early if your procurement needs more, because the answers are the same before and after you buy.

Question 40

Can we get our data out, or deleted?

Accepted Answer

Reports export as CSV at any time. When a company ends its agreement, its database is deleted on its instruction; a company can also ask for an individual's data to be removed at any time.

Question 41

Do you support SSO or HRIS integrations?

Accepted Answer

Sign in with Google or Microsoft is available today and is switched on per company. SAML single sign-on, SCIM provisioning and HRIS integrations are built for Enterprise customers whose contracts call for them — SAML first, because it is what IT asks for first.

Question 42

Can we import our people and skills?

Accepted Answer

Yes. People, job titles and reporting lines import from a spreadsheet; assessment questions import from CSV; a person's starting skills can be proposed from an uploaded CV or LinkedIn export. Everything exports back out as CSV.

Question 43

Is there a Slack or Microsoft Teams integration?

Accepted Answer

Slack, yes. Each person can connect their own Slack and get their notifications there as direct messages, and when your company switches it on, their approved leave shows as their Slack status. Admins can also ask Talk to your data a question in a Slack message. Microsoft Teams is not available yet; notifications also reach people in the product, by email, and as push notifications on their phone.

Question 44

Is there an API?

Accepted Answer

An API and webhooks are part of the Enterprise offer and are built against a customer's actual need rather than speculatively. If you have a specific system in mind, tell us what it should read or write.

Question 45

What do people need to use it?

Accepted Answer

A modern browser. There is nothing to install for the web product; the Android app is the same product wrapped for the phone, and it can be installed to the home screen from the browser on any device.

Question 46

Does it work on a phone?

Accepted Answer

Yes — assessments, exercises, plans and feedback all work on a phone, and people get push notifications when something needs them. The back office is designed for a desktop.

Question 47

What happens if something goes wrong?

Accepted Answer

Failures are reported to us automatically, and the product carries its own health check. Enterprise customers have an SLA and dedicated support; everyone else reaches a person by email.

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