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-powered platform designed to help organizations develop a skills-based workforce. By leveraging artificial intelligence, it automates the creation and maintenance of a dynamic skills ontology that defines relationships between skills, roles, and employees. This enables organizations to identify and address skill gaps effectively without manual updates. Activating Skills Foundation also activates the Skills Management plugin, which supports manual skill and category management.

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    Key Features

    • AI-Driven Skills Ontology: Continuously learns and infers skill relationships while allowing augmentation with your organization's internal data, providing actionable insights for talent management.
    • Skills-Based Career Data: Aligns job roles with relevant skills to foster employee growth and career development within the organization.
    • Proactive Prompts: Drives user adoption by sending automated reminders to employees and managers through multiple channels such as Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Zoom, and SMS, encouraging skill updates and validations within the natural workflow.
    • Employee Skills Profile: Offers employees a comprehensive and updatable view of their skills, including importing capabilities from resumes or LinkedIn profiles, empowering them to track and enhance their competencies.

    Key Outcomes

    By implementing Skills Foundation, ServiceNow customers can expect to:

    • Build a continuously updated, AI-enhanced skills taxonomy tailored to their organization’s needs.
    • Enable employees and managers to actively manage and validate skills, supporting career development and workforce planning.
    • Increase adoption and engagement through automated, context-aware prompts integrated into daily workflows.
    • Enhance talent development strategies by aligning employee skills with organizational roles and future growth opportunities.

    Getting Started and Additional Resources

    Customers can explore the Skills Foundation application to understand its role in talent development, install and configure the app and its features, and learn to manage skills profiles effectively. Additional information, release notes, and best practices are accessible through ServiceNow’s Employee Service Management portal, ServiceNow University, Customer Success Center, and the Now Community.

    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