Not surprisingly, AI is listed as the #1 trend in the recently published 2024 HR Trends: The Year of AI report, highlighting that all forms of AI to improve day-to-day productivity and employee engagement will be top of mind for organizations in 2024. Each year, the SAP SuccessFactors research team aggregates and synthesizes data from a wide range of carefully selected global and regional reputable business press resources that put forward HR trends and predictions and conduct a content analysis to derive key themes, or “meta-trends,” common among them to gain a comprehensive understanding of the most prevalent and important HR and workforce trends for the upcoming year. Here, AI dominates the 2024 trends discourse in terms of how it will transform the labor market, how it will drive productivity, and how it will need to be managed to prevent negative outcomes.
And trend #2 is skills and the fact that they are becoming the center of HR practices. The 2024 trends indicate that perhaps nowhere will the impact of AI have more important implications or be felt more strongly in the coming year for HR than in the areas of workforce and skills planning. Organizations will be forced to reconsider what AI skills they need, identify who (internally or externally) possesses those skills, and determine how they should best fill identified skills gaps in the short- and long-term – be it through reskilling and upskilling of existing talent, redeployment, external sourcing of full-time hires, or leveraging contract workers. Get valuable insights and advice about what to consider to get your workforce prepared for these upcoming changes in the blog Upskilling Your Workforce for the AI Era.
What does all of this mean in the area of learning? In past years, the focus of many Learning and Development organizations was on engaging learners with a modern experience, leveraging learning experience platforms (LXP). While offering an engaging learner experience is still relevant, this approach alone has not solved the challenge of increasing skills growth across the organization while aligning learning to strategic business goals. Learning and development (L&D) organizations are tasked to find the right balance between building up the strategic skills needed across their organization at an accelerated pace while helping employees to stay focused on the skills they need to stay relevant and prepared for the future. The good news is that employees are more than aware of this need and keen to receive training and other development opportunities to gain skills like in the context of AI. While all this transformation is going on, each and every organization needs to also keep up pace with ever changing rules and laws - even more driven by emerging technologies like the EU Artificial intelligence act as one prominent and most recent example. L&D organizations play a major role in keeping the workforce informed and compliant to minimize the risk for any damage claims or legal actions.
Both of these ‘trends’ highlighting the importance of AI and skills are highly reflected in our SAP SuccessFactors learning and talent product strategy. That is, to empower HR organizations to build a future-ready workforce using machine learning & AI-based talent intelligence, along with other unique product capabilities to upskill and reskill at scale and foster continuous talent development. The talent intelligence hub across SAP SuccessFactors solutions, including SAP SuccessFactors Learning, uses AI to continuously help organizations and employees understand their skills and match people with personalized career pathways.
In addition, with the 2H2023 release we delivered a new and re-architected learning home page to help organizations build up skills needed by offering personalized and prioritized learnings for every employee based on the areas they "have to learn", "need to learn" and "want to learn”. You can find more information here: Exciting news for SAP SuccessFactors Learning in 2... - SAP Community.
With this 1H2024 release, we further enhanced the new integrated learning experience with features that support more learner interactions - for example with optional assignments and administrator recommendations, - giving more flexibility for administrators to brand and customize the experience with custom cards and banners on the new home page -, and with significant enhancements on other highly used pages such as search and the learning history page. Let’s deep dive into those capabilities a bit more.
Learners can now also directly access important learnings – those optional assignments or "need to learn" items - in the upper part of the new learning home page. Here, learners find any non-required assignments they have. If allowed by the administrator, they can easily remove these assignments from their list, for example if they find that these are not currently relevant for them due to a change in their role, or because they already took a very similar training recently. This gives learners more freedom to self-manage their learning and saves the administrator the need to individually remove non-required training from learners' plans. Learners can also get reminder notifications for assignments without due dates, ensuring they stay informed and engaged, even when there is no mandatory completion deadline.
In addition to AI-driven personalized recommendations which leverage the talent intelligence hub to surface recommendations based on the learner’s own learning history, skills in their growth portfolio, role in the company, and job role, - the new home page now also allows learners to access administrator recommendations along with peer suggestions under the “Suggested for me” section. This gives organizations more flexibility in surfacing just the right learning opportunities to specific learner groups, while providing users with the same easy, consistent way to interact with recommendations: bookmarking those they like, to save them for later, dismissing those they’re not interested in – all with an engaging visual experience.
Another highly anticipated feature for the new experience is now also available with the latest release: With the new custom card functionality, and a brand-new configurable banner, administrators can promote specific content, links and important updates to learners, directly on the home page. The new custom cards – which replace the custom tile experience on the legacy learning home page – can be used to navigate learners to other internal or external pages, be it to a 3rd party learning content provider or to prefiltered LMS catalog searches targeting specific audiences. For more content directly on the home page, admins can configure a card to surface a dialog on click. In the new dedicated admin tools for custom cards, administrators can create and manage the cards, determine who can see each card, during which time, where the custom card section should be on the page and in which sequence cards should appear.
Similarly, to the custom cards on the SAP SuccessFactors home page, administrators can create learning cards that link directly to an internal deep link, such as a critical course, or external navigation pages, such as videos or targeted content libraries from any of our Open Content Library partners. Cards with dialog can support embedded iframes, HTML, images, videos, rich text editor to support links, messages, announcement, and other related use cases.
At the very top of the page, the newly configurable banner is the dedicated place for organizations to highlight time-sensitive information and resources that learners can use to discover, guide, and prioritize their learning. Administrators can choose to keep the default banner or create their own set of up to 5 banners, with custom images, title, subtitle, and a button that links to another page as needed.
The new banner functionality comes with a brand-new admin page to make it easy to create and manage the custom banners. Much like with the custom cards, administrators can also choose to show specific banners to all active users or a targeted audience, as well as specify the availability period.
As we keep enhancing the learner experience, we are making further improvements to other critical pages beyond the home page. The revamped learning history, now available to all users with the 1H 2024 release, focuses on ease of use and simplicity. This ensures that users can access all the essential information of their historic training records at a glance and take action towards the next step in their career development.
When it comes to discovering new training, the new search experience now has a filter for regions, to help employees quickly find courses based on their preferred locations. Note that it allows to select multiple regions, which can be useful for learners who frequently work at different locations.
Course home – where users find the details of a course – is now also available to users with external shopping accounts. Those users will now see dynamic actions like “register”, “buy course” or “add to cart” on the page, depending on the item classification and whether there are vouchers available. This means that these users now also get to benefit from the latest experience.
On the mobile side, the new learning experience now also supports optional assignments in Important Learning, self-directed items in Invest in Myself, and Task Observations in Requests for Me. Additionally, the Required Assignments cards now support engagement with Curricula requirements.
Finally, support for offline learning with downloaded content is now available on Android. It has the same usage flow as iOS, enabling users to advance their learning when they’re without a network connection. We also plan to integrate this feature within the Integrated Learning Experience in a future release.
In addition, as we continue our journey towards a person-based learning model, it’s important to take the skills and knowledge a person gains, across their different employments, into account. With this in mind, we are introducing the bulk merge capability to help admins to tie multiple user accounts together, either from different employments or from the conversion of an external to an internal user in SAP SuccessFactors Learning. This brings a significant gain in time and efficiency for admins, who previously could only merge users individually.
As this has been highly requested, I want to point out that we have delivered links to other Learning pages accessible directly from a drop-down menu at the top right of the integrated learning experience page with a separate patch in February of this year. Managers and supervisors can quickly access their "my team" page and any approvals. Learners can also easily access other quick links, any custom pages, and their learning history.
While more and more customers are adopting the new integrated learning experience, we are giving additional flexibility in how customers can roll out the change to their organization. Companies that have adopted the new integrated learning experience have the option to hide the user toggle to the legacy experience and only show the new experience to their users. Those customers who need a bit more time can still opt-out of the integrated learning experience until the November 2024 release.
Are you interested in more information on the 1H2024 release highlights? Then check out the SAP SuccessFactors 1H 2024 Release Highlights Learning video, Release Highlights Brochure Release Highlights Video and explore more Release Information at our customer community. You can also find a list of all enhancements on the What’s New Viewer and leverage the Roadmap Explorer to learn more about what’s planned for the future!
Talk to you soon!
Margit Bauer, Director Product Marketing for SAP SuccessFactors Learning
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