Laura Hyde |
Microsoft has added new artificial-intelligence-powered capabilities to its employee experience platform, Microsoft Viva.
The ‘Skills in Viva’ service is designed to help an organisation identify employees need to be upskilled or reskilled for the AI-powered workplace.
The new service leverages both Microsoft Graph, which provides employee activity signals across Microsoft 365 applications and services, and LinkedIn Skills Graph, a model that maps the global skills landscape, including how 39,000 unique skills relate to each other, job roles and educational content. Skills in Viva can then use AI to infer an employee’s skills profile, providing Viva customers with an improved understanding of current workforce skills.
Skills in Viva’s new set of dashboards within Viva Insights allow leaders to visualise metrics to identify how skills are distributed across teams within an organisation, as well as any skills gaps.
HR, Learning and Development teams, and managers can use Skills in Viva insights to create targeted upskilling or reskilling programmes for their employees. Viva Learning will then intelligently suggest new learning content based on skills employees are currently developing or maybe interested in learning.
In addition, Skills in Viva will intelligently suggests necessary skills for employees based on signals from Microsoft Graph, including activity across Microsoft 365 and Viva. Employees can manage their skills in the skills editor in Viva. They will show up in their Microsoft 365 profile card, which is accessible across Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and other Microsoft 365 apps and services.
“With rapid advancements in AI, the way companies manage and grow talent is reaching an inflection point – job requirements are changing, new skill sets are needed, and roles are evolving,” said Seth Patton, general manager, customer and employee experience solutions at Microsoft, in the ‘Introducing Skills in Microsoft Viva, a new AI-powered service to grow and manage talent’ blog post.
“Our goal is to meet customers where they are on their skills journey, which means taking an open, extensible approach to Skills in Viva that allows for interoperability with third-party applications our customers may already use as their primary skills records, enabling a more holistic and unified skills view.”
Microsoft has also made Viva Amplify generally available and is rolling the solution out to Viva suite subscription customers. Viva Amplify centralises campaign management, publishing and analytics, enabling business leaders and corporate communicators to easily connect with all employees.
“Using multichannel publishing, communicators publish across the apps and devices for specific employees, in just a few clicks,” said Patton. “Now they can create and manage organisation-wide or targeted campaigns to help inform everyone, create alignment, and inspire action – all from one place.”