Skills Foundation

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 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 enhance talent management and employee development by creating a dynamic skills ontology that continuously learns and updates itself. Activating the Skills Foundation plugin also enables the Skills Management application, which supports manual skill creation and assignment.

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    Skills Foundation integrates with Talent Development to empower employees in building essential skills aligned with their career goals.

    Key Features

    • AI-Driven Skills Ontology: Provides a constantly evolving map of skills, roles, and employee capabilities, enabling informed decision-making and addressing skill gaps without manual updates. It can be enriched with your organization's internal data for improved accuracy.
    • Skills-Based Career Data: Aligns job roles with relevant skills to support employee development and career growth within your organization.
    • Proactive Prompts: Encourages adoption by sending timely notifications to employees and managers through various channels such as Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Zoom, and SMS. These prompts facilitate tasks like updating or validating skills seamlessly within daily workflows.
    • Employee Skills Profile: Offers a comprehensive view of employee skills, allowing individuals to monitor, update, and import skills from resumes or LinkedIn profiles to stay competitive in evolving business environments.

    Practical Use for ServiceNow Customers

    ServiceNow customers can utilize Skills Foundation to automate and enhance their talent management processes by:

    • Establishing a self-updating, AI-enhanced skills database that reflects real-time competencies.
    • Improving employee engagement and skill validation through proactive communications integrated into familiar collaboration tools.
    • Supporting career development initiatives by linking skills with organizational job roles and growth opportunities.
    • Enabling employees to maintain accurate and current skills profiles, which facilitates better workforce planning and personal development.

    Getting Started and Additional Resources

    Customers can begin by exploring how Skills Foundation supports Talent Development, followed by installing and configuring the application and related features. The platform includes detailed guidance on managing skills profiles and accessing component references such as fields and tables.

    Additional resources include HR Service Delivery release notes, ServiceNow University training, the Customer Success Center for best practices, and the Now Community for user collaboration.

    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.

    Get started

    Additional resources