Exploring Skills Foundation

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

    The Skills Foundation platform leverages AI Search to process industry-specific skills data and serves as the foundational engine for Talent Development applications within ServiceNow. It enables organizations to build a skills-based workforce by integrating skills into career planning, learning, and hiring processes, thereby supporting individual employee growth and improving business outcomes.

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    Key Features

    • Skills Foundation Engine: Powers all Talent Development capabilities by embedding skills at the core of career planning and development.
    • Skill Validation in Manager Hub: Managers can review and validate employee skill proficiency during scheduled conversations, ensuring accurate skill profiles.
    • Skills-driven Learning Recommendations: Integrates with Learning to provide personalized course recommendations based on employee skills, enhancing engagement and productivity.
    • Proactive Prompts: Delivers contextual, actionable insights to managers and employees through multiple channels such as Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Zoom, and SMS to encourage timely skill development.
    • Multilingual Support: Skill names and descriptions are translated when employees select a non-English preferred language, requiring language plugins and separate uploads for custom skills.
    • Hiring Core Integration: Stores hiring requirements and uses Skills Foundation predictions to recommend skills for role groups, streamlining recruitment.
    • Import Skills: Allows importing skills from resumes and LinkedIn profiles (Pro-plus license customers only) to enrich employee skill profiles.
    • Skill Recommender: Employees can search and add skills they want to develop, fostering continuous learning and growth.

    Key Outcomes

    • Comprehensive Employee Skill Profiles: Provides a detailed view of each employee’s current skills.
    • Pre-seeded Skills: Automatically identifies essential skills for employees using external and employee-provided data, prompting timely updates.
    • Validated Skills: Ensures skill proficiency accuracy through manager validation, visible to employees on their profiles.
    • Activity Insights for Managers: Enables managers to track employee progress on skill development activities before validation.
    • Enhanced Workforce Transformation: Connects skills to actionable insights that accelerate business outcomes and support strategic workforce planning.

    The Skills Foundation platform uses AI Search to process your industry skills data. Learn how Skills Foundation can help transform your organization to build a workforce that is based on skills.

    Overview of Skills Foundation

    The core capability of the platform is the underlying technology that resides in the Skills Foundation engine.

    Skills Foundation overview

    Skills Foundation for Talent Development

    The Skills Foundation engine acts as the foundational layer that powers all the capabilities within Talent Development. Talent Development applications use skills at its core to guide managers and employees through their career plans. This approach not only supports individual development but also contributes to achieving better business outcomes. For more information, see Growth Experiences.

    Note:
    Skills Foundation is only integrated with Talent Development applications.

    Skill Validation in Manager Hub

    As a manager, you can review and validate the skill proficiency levels updated by your employees by opening the conversations scheduled with them. Within Conversations there’s a dedicated section that offers details about skills that require validation. For more information, see Validate skills in Manager Hub.

    Skills-driven Learning recommendations

    Talent Development uses Skills Foundation to deliver learning recommendations for employees and their managers, keeping them engaged and productive. For more information, see Learning overview. The Skills Foundation application integrates with Learning to introduce skills-driven learning search results that your managers can use to recommend courses based on the skills of your employees. For more information, see Learning integration with Skills Foundation.

    Proactive Prompts integrated with Skills Foundation

    Proactive Prompts enable contextual and proactive engagement for your managers and employees by bringing actionable insights as prompts into their flow of work. You can use these prompts in multiple engagement channels, such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Zoom, and the short messaging service (SMS). For more information, see Proactive Prompts for Skills Foundation.

    Support for multiple languages in Skills Foundation

    Employees can view the skill names and their descriptions translated when they change their preferred language to a non-English language. For information on the languages supported by AI Search, see Activate a language.
    Note:
    • Make sure that the respective language plugins are installed to ensure that the skill translations are also downloaded for those languages.
    • If you have custom skills, you must get the custom skills translated and upload them separately.
    • When searching for skills using the Search option, use only your preferred language. For example, if your preferred language is Dutch, you search in Dutch.

    Hiring core for Skills Foundation

    Hiring Core provides a repository to store information for your hiring requirements. Activate the Hiring Core plugin (app-hiring-core) to start using it. Skills Foundation runs predictions on the data in the hiring core tables and offers skill recommendations for role groups. For more information, see Hiring Core.

    Key benefits

    Connect skills to action in the transformation of your workforce and accelerate business outcomes by using the Skills Foundation application.

    Table 1. Skills Foundation benefits
    Features Benefits
    Employee skills profile Provides a comprehensive view of the skills that your employees have.
    Pre-seed employee skills Identifies the essential skills of an employee by analyzing the external data and data provided by employees about skills and titles. Prompt employees to update their skills based on this information.
    About Job Architecture Associates the career data of your organization with skills.
    Proactive Prompts for Skills Foundation Enables contextual and proactive engagement for your managers and employees by bringing actionable insights as prompts into their flow of work.
    Import skills from your resume or LinkedIn profile Imports skills from resumes and LinkedIn profiles of the employees.
    Note:
    This feature is only available to customers with a Pro-plus license.
    Validated skills Managers validate the skill proficiency level of employees in the Manager Hub and employees can see these validated skills on their skills profile.
    View activity insights Managers can view and review activities related to the skill that an employee has made progress on before validated them.
    Add skills by using the skill recommender Enables your employees to search for skills that they’re interested in developing or improving and then adding them to their skills profile.