Skills Foundation

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Skills Foundation

    The ServiceNow® Skills Foundation application is an AI-driven platform designed to help organizations develop a skills-based workforce. It leverages artificial intelligence to support talent management and employee development by providing a dynamic, constantly learning skills ontology that defines and measures relationships between skills, roles, and employees. This reduces the need for manual updates and enhances decision-making around skill gaps.

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    Activating the Skills Foundation plugin also enables the Skills Management plugin, which allows manual creation and assignment of skills and skill categories.

    Key Features

    • Bring Your Own Skills Ontology: AI-powered and continuously updated skills ontology that can be enriched with your organization’s internal data to provide actionable insights.
    • Skills-Based Career Data: Aligns job roles with relevant skills to support employee growth and career advancement within the company.
    • Proactive Prompts to Drive Adoption: Sends automated prompts to employees and managers through multiple channels (Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Zoom, SMS) to encourage skill updates and validations, integrating seamlessly into daily workflows.
    • Employee Skills Profile: Enables employees to build and maintain comprehensive skill profiles, import skills from resumes or LinkedIn, and actively manage their development in response to evolving business needs.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Empowers workforce development by creating a clear, data-driven view of skills across the organization.
    • Facilitates proactive talent development through AI insights and automated engagement prompts.
    • Integrates easily with existing tools and workflows, ensuring higher employee participation and skills accuracy.
    • Supports HR and talent teams in aligning employee capabilities with organizational goals and future opportunities.

    Getting Started and Additional Resources

    ServiceNow customers can begin by installing and configuring the Skills Foundation application and related features. Learning materials cover how to manage skills profiles and understand application components like fields and tables.

    Additional support includes:

    • HR Service Delivery release notes for latest updates.
    • Employee Service Management portal for implementation guidance.
    • ServiceNow University for training and career resources.
    • Customer Success Center and Now Community for best practices and peer engagement.

    The ServiceNow® Skills Foundation application is an AI-driven platform that you can use in your organization to develop a workforce that is based on skills.

    Important:
    Skills Foundation uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help your organization in talent management and employee development. Skills Management application enables you to manually create skills and skill categories, and also assign them to users manually. Activating the Skills Foundation plugin (com.sn_skills_int) will also activate the Skills Management plugin (com.snc.skills_management). For information on Skills Management, see Skills Management.

    You can empower your employees by enhancing their essential skills as part of their career aspirations using Talent Development and Skills Foundation.

    The key components of the Skills Foundation application are:

    Bring your own skills ontology

    A dynamic AI-driven skills ontology can help your organization to define and measure the relationships between the skills, roles, and your employees. The skills ontology provides actionable data that guides learned decisions and effectively addresses skill gaps. Powered by AI, the skills ontology is constantly learning, inferring, collecting, and maintaining information about the skills, which means that your organization need not update the data manually. You can augment the skills ontology with your organization's internal data to further enrich the ontology.

    Skills-based career data

    Match the career data of your organization with skills to enhance the development of your employees by aligning actual job roles with relevant skills. You can empower your employees to excel in their current roles while fostering opportunities for future growth and advancement within the company.

    Proactive Prompts to drive adoption

    Drive adoption in your organization by sending prompts proactively to your employees and managers so that they perform the specific tasks in their natural flow of work. For example, prompts can be used to request an employee to update their skills or for a manager to validate the skills of their team. You can use Proactive Prompts in multiple engagement channels like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Zoom, and the short messaging services (SMS). Your employees can easily update their skills.

    Employee skills profile

    Build a complete profile of your talent with a comprehensive view of the skills that employees possess. Your employees can regularly monitor and update their skills profiles to gain the knowledge and capabilities to thrive in dynamic business environments. By leveraging their skills profiles, your employees can easily import their skills from resumes or LinkedIn profiles.

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    Additional resources