We are excited to share this blog for a deep dive into the new features for theFebruary 2024 Store and Washington release (Q1 2024) of our new talent development suite within the ServiceNow Store.
Please note that this is a summary of the most notable items and is not an exhaustive list. For full details of this release, refer to the Employee Service Management release notes for the Washington DC release.
New Capabilities:
- Opportunity Marketplace
- Employee Connections - Mentoring
- Team Skills in Manager Hub
- Skills Intelligence Workspace
Exciting enhancements:
Talent mobility has increasingly become recognized as a strategic imperative for organizations seeking to attract, retain, and develop top talent in today's dynamic and interconnected global marketplace. Effective mobility programs require a holistic approach that balances the needs of the organization with those of individual employees, supported by clear communication, robust support systems, and leveraging technology to facilitate seamless transitions.
ServiceNow Opportunity Marketplace is a centralized space within Employee Center where organizations can share internal jobs with employees, from an integration with their applicant tracking system. Employees can discover internal opportunities relevant to their career aspirations and development and it serves as a hub for career exploration and growth.
Key features of Opportunity Marketplace include:
- Search Functionality: Users can search for available opportunities within the organization based on job title, location, or description.
- Customized Opportunity Views:
- Internal Job Listings: Displays job details such as title, location, and a match analysis that compares skills and preferences with job requirements.
- Match Analysis: Shows how a user's skills align with specific opportunities.
- Quick View: Provides a snapshot of job location, description, and applicant criteria.
- User Interaction:
- Create Aspirations: Allows users to set goals or aspirations for specific jobs.
- Share Opportunities: Enables users to share job listings with colleagues, along with personal notes.
- Personalized Recommendations:
- Opportunities of Interest: Suggests job openings based on a user's profile, skills, and current role.
- Shared Opportunities: Displays job listings that colleagues have shared within the organization.
- Company Highlights:
- Featured Opportunities: Showcases jobs that the company deems noteworthy or important.
- Testimonials: Displays feedback or comments from coworkers about their experiences with specific opportunities.
Refer to Opportunity Marketplace product documentation for additional details.
Employee Connections (Mentoring)
Employee Connections offers improved networking opportunities for employees and enables them to make meaningful connections that expedites their learning and amplifies their potential for career development. It equips employees with tools such as Mentoring, which enables employees with less experience or knowledge (mentee) to find a suitable person(s) that has more knowledge and more experience (mentors) to help the mentee grow personally and professionally, develop new skills and navigate their career path.
Key features of Mentoring include:
- Employees can view suggested mentors based on targeted skills, enrollment preferences, match insights, and mentor expertise.
- Employees can search for mentors based on name, job profile, and match score and add mentorship activities to their individual development plans (Growth Plans).
- Mentors and mentees can use scheduling tools within the Mentoring application for continuous conversations and engagement.
Refer to the Mentoring product documentation for additional details
Team Skills in Manager Hub empowers managers to develop the right skillset in their team for today's and tomorrow's business requirements. It offers managers a consolidated overview of their team’s skill strengths and weakness, an
understanding of whether skills meet the requirements for roles, and details for their ongoing and past development activities.
Key features of Team Skills in Manager Hub include:
- A team skill summary with:
- The strong skills in the team and details of the team members who possess those strong skills.
- The skills in the team that need attention along with the details of team members who might need upskilling.
- An overview of skills that the team members possess along with the count of people across each skill in the team.
- Whether employees meet skill requirements and expectations for their role
- A score computed for the employee based on proficiencies of their individual skills, validation status of the skills.
- The manager can validate employee skills from this view.
- An overview of different skills the team members are working towards.
- An overview of individual employee skills:
- Consolidated view of skills for direct reports.
- The scale on which a skill is measured for proficiency.
- Sort employees for a skill based on proficiency.
- Top skills and weak skills for each employee.
- Indicators to identify validated and unvalidated skills.
- Easy employee skill validation from this view.
- A detailed view of employee skills:
- Drill down to specific employee and see the expected skill proficiency, current skill proficiency for all/specific skills.
- An overview of ongoing Talent Development activities (Learning, Growth Plan, etc.) for each skill.
- View validated and unvalidated skills.
- Validate a skill from this view.
- Assign learning related to the skill to help employee gain the skill or attain higher proficiency of a skill they already have.
- View details for ongoing and past activities for a skill.
- Navigate to the corresponding Talent Development activity (Growth Plan, etc.) related to the skill.
Note: Implementing Skills Intelligence and employees adding proficiencies to their skills are important pre-requisites to derive value from Team Skills in Manager Hub. Adoption of Talent Development applications such as Growth Plans, Aspirations, and Learning will increase the visibility a manager has into the team member’s skill development activities.
Refer to Team skills in Manager Hub product documentation for additional details.
For Skills Admins, or any role that needs access and insights to skills data and job architecture, the Skills Intelligence Workspace is big news. It is an AI-powered workspace that offers skill and job architecture data insights, recommendations for action, streamlined data importing, and easy data management -- all from a single workspace.
Key features of the Skills Intelligence Workspace include:
- Skills Intelligence Workspace Landing Page: A single pane view to understand and access skills and job architecture data. The landing page offers recommendations for any important actions to be taken (“Important Insights”), an overview of the health of the Skills Intelligence data in the system (“Overview and health”), access to a list/form view to manage data records, and access to an interactive visual of job architecture.
- Guided Set Up: Easily set up Skill Intelligence with a guided, seven step experience. Once the Guided Set Up is complete, the Skills Intelligence Workspace will be populated with skill and job architecture data, and ready to offer insights and recommendations.
- Job Architecture View: New with the May store release, understanding and updating job architecture is even easier with an interactive visual of the job architecture. Click into each node (e.g., “job family”) for more information and direct access to edit/manage the data records that support it.
- A list/form view: A sorted, organized list of data with access to individual records for skills and job architecture. View data and receive AI-powered recommendations for keeping the data fresh and accurate.
- AI-powered recommendations: Utilizing your organization’s skill and job architecture data, along with ServiceNow's extensive industry data and algorithms curated by ServiceNow data scientists, receive recommendations tailored to your specific needs.
- Skill recommendations: align skills with roles, ensuring teams have the right expertise to perform in their roles.
- Related Role Group Suggestions: Guidance to relate role groups, optimizing your organization's role architecture.
Note: Customers that do not have full job architecture or skill data can still get started with the Skills Intelligence Workspace and build their data (augmented by curated market skills data offered OOB) over time.
Refer to Skills Intelligence Workspace product documentation for additional details.
In 2023 with the Vancouver release, we introduced Career hub. Career hub provides a personalized and intuitive experience to employees, via the Employee Center, and it enables them to expertly navigate their career growth and development journey. With this release, we have added additional capabilities and enhancements to further enhance the employee’s talent development experience.
Overview of Career hub new features:
- Opportunities widget: this new widget showcases up to six (6) internal job opportunities from an organization’s applicant tracking system. Employees can quickly view the job title, location, and the match analysis to determine if they want to pursue this new opportunity.
- Application status widget: this new widget provides employees with a quick snapshot of the status for the submitted job application from the application tracking system.
Refer to EGD Career hub overview product documentation for additional details.
Aspirations was introduced in the initial release of the talent development suite in 2023 with the Vancouver release. In the context of career development, Aspirations refers to the professional goals and ambitions that an employee strives to achieve in their career. Aspirations can be an area of interest, a new skill, a new role, or a self-defined category that falls outside of the interest, skill and role categories. These aspirations can help inspire and guide employees on their career growth and development journey.
Employee are guided through the process of creating a new Aspiration and are given suggested activities such as taking a learning course, initiating a conversation with their manager to discuss their career growth desires, or building an individual development plan to provide more structure around their career goals.
Refer to Aspirations product documentation for additional details.
Career Conversations was originally released in the Vancouver release (Q3 2023). Employee Career Conversations are essential for promoting individual growth, enhancing organizational performance, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and development within the workplace. Conversations helps managers/employees and mentors/mentees have more effective growth conversations.
The Washington Store release (Q1 2024) brings the following enhancements:
- Integration with Microsoft Exchange Online Spoke and scheduling meetings from ServiceNow
- This is enabled for various types of conversations, including growth plan “check-ins” and “mentoring” type of conversations.
- Allowing managers to manually close a conversation to mark it as completed.
Refer to Career Conversations product documentation for additional details.
Want to learn more about how to get started on your talent development journey? Please reach out to your account team to schedule 1:1discussion with our Talent Development specialists.
Stay tuned for additional articles that highlight our latest enhancements to our features and capabilities of the Talent Development suite.
