We have invested heavily into providing great user experiences with past releases, such as our optimized user interface for Learning administrators, Course home or the Horizon visual theme as part of our HXM reimagine user experience initiative across all platforms such as Web, iOS and Android native apps. In addition, ensuring experiences are mobile responsive for users, regardless of device.
SAP Fiori Horizon visual theme is being applied across all SAP applications to deliver a consistent user experience. It provides a modern, friendly user interface and modular design system. See some current examples for SAP SuccessFactors Learning below.
When enabled, the Horizon visual theme updates the styling of several UI elements:
- Updated font sizes and weights
- More rounded corners
- New base color scheme (for UI elements that don’t have their color defined in Theme Manager)
- Updated icons
- Updated margins and padding
- Updated shadows
A streamlined and personalized learner experience that helps employees discover relevant learning content and trainings more efficiently is highly needed while organizations are seeking optimal ways to upskill and reskill their employees. To meet these needs it’s great time to leverage Course Home as an optimized experience designed to improve discoverability and encourage course completion.
With this release we deliver more enhancements for Course Home, such as capabilities ratings get published and displayed when a user completes a course to help support skills-based learning. To be able to leverage this capability, you can take this opportunity to turn on the integration with the talent intelligence hub. Talent Intelligence Hub is a centralized framework that connects individual attributes, strengths and styles, and expressive preferences to both people and their experiences throughout SAP SuccessFactors solutions. By integrating with the talent intelligence hub learning can consume these whole self attributes with this release.
Once you migrate to the talent intelligence hub you will be able to see a menu entry for ‘Attributes’. Learners can see skills and competencies information in the selected course.
You will also be able to search competencies and skills and associate them to courses and programs. Learners can see skills and competencies information in the course and once completed, this information is available in the Learners Growth Portfolio. Please note that this is an opt-in feature. It is important to note that to support the adoption of new innovations like the talent intelligence hub and new Learning Homepage (read more about it at the end of this document), starting with the 1H 2023 release, SAP SuccessFactors is initiating the process to seal the integrations for all other tenants. See this blog post Learning and Platform integration on the Customer Community for more details.
Coming back to the news about the extended Course Home capabilities. We also have enhanced the Course Home area to support manager actions directly without having to go through multiple steps or navigate to other places. This means, managers can register their team and assign training to them through the Course Home experience.
With the 1H 2023 release we also offer Offline Learning within the Course Home experience making it possible to complete learning assignments from anywhere without an internet connection. Completion progress can automatically be synced at a later time. This is available for iOS initially, with more planned devices to come with future releases.
As part of our strategic partnership with Microsoft we integrate small actionable HR processes from SAP SuccessFactors solutions into Microsoft Teams. This allows employee processes in the flow of work and increases productivity as well as engagement. We also think it is highly important to embed learning and related actions into daily activities. Therefore we offer integrations between SAP SuccessFactors Learning and Microsoft to place learning in the flow of work. With this release we have enhanced those already existing integrations so that users are able to receive overdue learning reminders in Microsoft Teams.
In addition, users can approve learning assignments. An approver can get notified and receive the request with the option to get more details and to take action directly in Microsoft Teams.
Find more general information about how to integrate SAP SuccessFactors with Microsoft here.
Since the 1H 2021 release, SAP SuccessFactors Learning data is part of SuccessFactors Stories in People Analytics. When using People Stories, customers can use interactive, graphical tiles and dashboards for a bird’s-eye view with the ability to drill down to specific details and benefits from one unified reporting tool. To help you get started with Stories in People Analytics to deliver meaningful business insights, we’ve compiled a set of Story templates and the supporting documentation, which you can access here. I want to highlight in that context that Learning standard templates in stories in SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics are on the way and planned to be available with 2H2023, so stay tuned on this topic.
We know it’s all about skills these days – organizations need to build skills to quickly adapt and retain talent with in-demand skills as this will continue to be one of the biggest differentiators for organizational success in the future. According to IDC, Accelerate the Value of Learning with Learning Experience Management, Nov 2022 across the top ten EX spend priorities, skills training and improved workforce gap analysis are disproportionate favorites: 94% of business leaders are increasing spend on skills and talent gap analysis, 93% are concentrating on maximizing employee development potential, and 80.5% are increasing spend on upskilling. Our SuccessFactors Future-Ready Workforce product strategy, which learning is a major part of, will help you to create alignment between the ambitions of people and organizations to drive shared achievement. When employees are challenged and given career opportunities aligned to their ambitions they do their best work, collectively driving organizations forward, faster. You can find more information about how we are proceeding with this strategy at SAP SuccessFactors First Half 2023 Release: Skill-Centric Innovation to Build Your Future-Ready Workforce.
And there is much more to come. Later this year we plan to offer our customers a newly re-designed Learning Homepage. In beta right now, this new Learning experience is much more than just a new user interface. Prioritized and organized to meet the learner’s individual needs, the intuitive experience will provide learning options in the context of what the user wants to accomplish considering organizational needs but also all the aspects of the individual’s aspirations, motivations, skill targets, and learning preferences, in addition to their role and previous experiences. We have started to offer integrations for Talent intelligence and Learning with this release. The enhanced cross-modular functions and features with Talent intelligence, Growth portfolio or SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace will break down the silos of navigating through the suite to support a consistent user experience and a companywide integrated learning strategy for accelerated skills-building processes. We are excited for the planned future innovations ahead for SAP SuccessFactors Learning.
But let’s stick to the current release for now. Interested in more information on the 1H2023 release highlights? Then check out the Learning Release Highlights Video, Release Highlights Brochure and explore more Release Information at our customer community. You can find a list of all enhancements on the What’s New Viewer.
Margit Bauer, Director Solution Marketing for SAP SuccessFactors Learning