Framework

What vendor-neutral actually costs

It is easy to claim and expensive to hold. Here is what it means in the material.

Vendor-neutral is usually asserted on an About page and contradicted in the slides, where the worked examples are all one manufacturer's console because that is what the author had access to.

In this curriculum no manufacturer or software vendor is named anywhere - not in the teaching, not in the labs, not in the assessment. Worked examples use synthetic data throughout, and invented identifiers are constructed so they cannot collide with a real trading partner's.

The cost is that we cannot teach a specific console, and a learner does not leave able to operate one particular product. What they leave with is the ability to evaluate any of them - which is the durable skill, because the estate they inherit will not be the one they trained on.

It also means the material is usable by an organisation that has already bought its estate, without asking them to sit through a competitor's example.