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With a growing need to support a culture of lifelong learning in an ever-evolving work landscape, it becomes more important than ever to surface learning opportunities to your workforce that are tailored to your learners’ needs, role and aspirations. Learning and upskilling should be easily accessible, timely and contextual – anytime, anywhere, on any device. The new integrated learning experience, with the whole self model at its core and powered by talent intelligence hub and a strong AI/ML recommendations engine, will deliver an elevated learning experience to your organization. A key part of this, the new and re-architected learning home page became available in 2H 2023.
General
What is the integrated learning experience and what is the driver behind SAP SuccessFactors delivering this experience?
SAP SuccessFactors Learning is a key part of our broader Future Ready Workforce product strategy. The integrated learning experience for SAP SuccessFactors Learning is a cornerstone of that strategy, and includes a newly re-designed Learning home page, but goes way beyond just a new user interface.
Prioritized and organized to meet the learner’s individual needs, the intuitive design of the Learning home page provides learning options across the areas where users have to learn (in the context of safety and compliance), need to learn (to further excel in their roles, jobs and teams), and where they want to learn (based on their own interests, aspirations and motivations). This allows learners to accomplish learning not only towards organizational needs, but it also drives an intrinsic culture of learning by tapping into the learner’s aspirations, motivations, skill targets, and learning preferences, in addition to their role and previous experiences.
Under the hood, more enhanced cross-modular functions and features with AI-driven talent intelligence, growth portfolio and SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace bring together the power of the SuccessFactors suite to support both a consistent user experience and a companywide integrated learning strategy for accelerated skill-building processes.
To learn more about the drivers behind this experience, please read this blog.
What will we see and when?
With the 2H 2023 release, customers have started seeing the integrated learning experience on the new learning home page – on web and mobile.
The initial version of the new experience was focused on engaging and motivating learners with prioritized content which makes it easy to complete their mandatory assignments on time, stay on top of their self-directed learning, and provide contextual recommendations to support their continuous upskilling.
By prioritizing required assignments learners can get in and out of the system while completing their mandatory requirements faster than ever before. All required assignments and curricula can be found up front and center, with an easy indication of meeting compliance. Clicking on the compliance indicator for curricula will also take the user straight to the curricula overview, for a guided experience. In addition, learners are able to plan their learning activities with the convenience of blocking their calendars directly from the cards, to make time to learn.
Visualizing required assignments and curricula
Motivation comes in many forms – including interaction with peers and recommendations and suggestions from those close to you. By highlighting these suggestions in their own area, and treating the referred learning with the importance needed, users can quickly find and interact with items that mean more to them. This also supports building a habit-forming learning culture, where employees are encouraged to continuously learn and upskill.
Self-directed learning activities
Discovery is a key part of building curiosity. We introduced a brand new search capability with smart recommendations and the ability to search based on specific skills and other attributes, which will be available to customers who opt in to using SuccessFactors’ Data Platform.
New Search experience (2H 2023)
Including AI recommendations right on the main page also allows learners to receive personalized recommendations based on both their own learning history, as well as recommendations based on their growth portfolio, role in the company, and job role. As with all machine learning algorithms, these recommendations will improve and become more and more valuable over time, with further usage and inputs. (Note: the AI recommendations are an opt-in feature, and available to customers based on a staggered rollout.)
Personalized learning recommendations
Skills and other attributes are embedded in the foundation of all the items showcased in this learning experience – details on courses and their tagged skills and attributes can now be seen in the course home pages. We have also enhanced the item connector to better enable administrators to ensure their courses are tagged with searchable skills by supporting the ability to mass update items, thereby accelerating associating learning content with skills.
Is SAP SuccessFactors Learning building a Learning Experience Platform (LXP)?
No, the new integrated learning experience isn’t about delivering an LXP. It is building the bridge between the traditional learning management system (LMS) and user-centric features typically associated with LXPs for learner engagement.
By bringing LMS’ robust support for compliance and learning management together with a fully revamped experience centered around the learner’s needs, built on a strong foundation of personalized ML recommendations and intelligent suite data, we are establishing a new learning paradigm: reducing manual effort with programmatic learning and AI, supporting multi-modal learning leveraging the complete SuccessFactors suite and 3rd party applications, and enabling a culture of learning anytime, anywhere. LXPs continue to offer additional capabilities for learning specific use cases for companies requiring tailored custom experiences.
Watch the product demo for more details:
Product demo
Technical questions
How easy is it to implement the new experience?
It comes out of the box! Provided your instance meets the technical prerequisites (see details below), your learners could automatically have access to this new experience in 2H 2023 when they navigate to their learning home page within SuccessFactors. The legacy experience is still available, if you want to keep it for a transition period, and users can flip back and forth using a simple toggle at the top, thus keeping access to the functionality they are familiar with, as needed. Administrators can determine whether the default page is the current experience or the new one to start with. Users can then chose their preference, which will be honored when they come back to Learning. Customers can also choose to use the new experience only.
Learners can start reaping the benefits of the new experience – with valuable new features such as the ability to quickly create calendar blocks to make time for learning, straight from the home page, or the brand new learning bookmarks – while still keeping access to their existing views and tools as more features get added to the new experience over time.
Does the new experience work on a tablet or mobile browser?
Yes. The integrated learning experience is developed to be entirely mobile-web responsive, and functional experience updates are available on your SAP SuccessFactors mobile application. The user interface will adjust in the mobile browser you are using and operate within the screen’s available size. The native mobile applications continue to be updated with the new experience facets as well.
Can we customize the new experience?
We are optimizing the integrated learning experience to necessitate as little configuration as possible to simplify the task for learning admins. While we were working with our Design Advisors on customization capabilities, the initial release of the integrated learning experience was delivered fully out-of-the-box, with some features such as recommendations being opt-in, so that learners can start using it on Day 1. We added customization capabilities in 1h 2024 release (see details further below).
Prerequisites
How can we prepare?
To get the new integrated learning experience, you will want to ensure that your instance meets the following prerequisites:
- Adopt Course Home
- Have the tenant integration “sealed” (see documentation and blog on the Community) – we took care of it for many customers already in the last few months. To verify that your instance is ready, you can also check your sealing status directly from the Application Administration > Integrated Learning Settings page. Customers can now also self-initiate the sealing of their instance, as detailed in What's New Viewer: Platform Integration Request for Sealing by Administrator.
- Activate LMS-IAS integration (for Learning only users)
To further maximize the value of the integrated learning experience, we also recommend that you:
- Familiarize yourself with the Talent Intelligence Hub and enable your learners to access Growth Portfolio
- Evaluate if Opportunity Marketplace could be a valuable addition for your organization, to drive peer- and experiential learning and provide personalized recommendations across many development opportunities
Note: Course Home became available for users with an external shopping account type as of the 1H 2024 release.
We have prepared some new documentation to support our customers and their journey to using the new Integrated Learning Experience after the 2H 2023 release of General Availability, and updated it after 1H 2024 and 2H 2024 releases. Please reference the two documents below:
Customer Transition Guide for Integrated Learning Experience
Conditions and Rules for Section Display and Supported Activities - Integrated Learning Experience
What do our learners need to know about the new experience?
The new experience improves the way learners will interact with learning, and many will find it very intuitive as the usage of interactive cards is similar to the latest SAP SuccessFactors home page.
There are however some significant differences in the new experience, compared to what learners may be used to:
- The concept of “learning plan” has changed to better reflect the learner’s different motivations and urgency for completion. Previously assigned required training (assigned by others) will be separated from the self-directed learning, to give greater clarity on what workers have to learn vs what they want or need to learn for their own growth.
- Learning content is organized in different sections and prioritized by due date. Secondary pages allow the learner to deep-dive into more details like learning assignments that are due far in the future.
- There is a new ability for learners to block their calendars to make time for learning, straight from the home page.
- Learners will have the ability to easily save learning content for later by using the “bookmark” feature for courses and other learning content, providing an easy way to manage their learning interests and retrieve it in one single page, separated from courses they are already engaged with or have been assigned to.
- Recommendations will no longer disappear upon click, but only based on explicit user action – either bookmarking to keep the recommendation, or dismissing it as “not interested” – allowing learners to better manage the content they want to save and remove the content they are not interested in from view.
- If learners are looking for a specific tile or content from the legacy view, the toggle at the top of the page will let them access the previous experience
- Curricula compliance is shown clearly at the top of the required learning section with a status bubble, but no longer shows the number of curricula open versus completed.
- Users no longer have to “assign to me” to add items to their learning plans. Instead, bookmarks allow for “save for later” type capability, and self-driven learning drives better learner behaviors.
- Peer, manager and admin suggested content will show up in the “recommended for you” section
What’s next?
Roadmap for the integrated learning experience
The initial focus in the first release was on the learner experience, with a new streamlined user interface that focuses employee learning on what they have to, need to, and want to learn, powered by AI recommendations unique to each employee.
Since then, in 1H 2024, we already:
- Enabled access to views and legacy pages directly from the new learning home page, including manager and instructor views, access to learning history, any existing custom pages and custom links... ** See the What's New Viewer
- Added further capabilities in the "need to learn" area, including non-required assignments and administrator recommendations
- Support branding and customization capabilities for the new experience with brand new configurable banners and custom cards
- Further enhanced search capabilities
- Extended the visual enhancements to the detail pages for learning history
Configurable banner (Prototype)
Self-directed learning and task observation requests on Mobile (Prototype)
For more details on the 1H 2024 roadmap and beyond, watch the replay of the latest customer session.
In 2H 2024, we:
- Delivered a refreshed, visually consistent manager view
- Supported delegation and approvals from the new learning home page
- Supported the ability to browse the library based on categories
- Offered more customization capabilities with new custom pages leveraging the latest banner and custom card features
- Further enhanced admin capabilities for the integrated learning experience
How to adopt
Based on some of our customer feedback, we maintained the flexibility to opt out of the new experience entirely in 1H 2024, for those who may need more time to prepare for the change. We also heard from many other customers the need to be able to fully move to the Integrated Learning Experience quicker, so we added the configuration to hide the switch back to the legacy learning page with 1H 2024.
When will the integrated learning experience become universal?
Read below to understand the phased rollout and options:
2H 2024: The option to opt out of the new learning experience is no longer available. Customers can set the legacy experience as the default experience for learners, by setting the user toggle default to off, which means that learners start with the legacy experience but can choose to use the new experience by turning the toggle to on. Or customers can use the new experience as default using the admin setting, and let their users access the legacy home page via the toggle at the top of the page.
The new option to use exclusively the new experience (no user toggle on the home page) will of course stay available: Customers who want the new home page to be the ONLY experience, and don't want to offer the legacy experience as an option to learners, can choose to hide the user toggle entirely.
Customers who are already using the new experience will not see a change in 2H 2024.
Universal Push for Integrated Learning Experience in 2H 2025
Customers will have until 2H2025 to fully adopt the new experience, which will become universal as the only available experience in 2H2025 for all commercial customers on eligible tenants.
What does this mean?
The configuration options will stay the same as in 2H2024: admins can select to use the new experience only, or keep legacy and new experience side by side, with the user able to switch between the two experiences.
Any change to the experience is at the discretion of customer administrators: SAP will not change the setting with 1H2025 release. This will give customers more flexibility with the timing of when to push the changes to their users.
The plan is for the new learning home page to become the only experience for our Learning Platform in 2H2025. That means that the legacy version of the Learning home page is planned to be deprecated and all learners will only see the new experience.
Note: Validated Learning customers will be on a separate timeline aligned with their 2026 upgrade release.
Near Real Time Updates to Library Access for Enhanced Search
Changes made to library access are now reflected in near real time in the enhanced search results.
Previously, when an administrator assigned or removed learner access to a library in Manage User Learning >Assignment Profiles > Libraries, the changes took up to 72 hours to be reflected in preview environments and up to 8 hours to be reflected in production environments.
Now, these changes are reflected in the enhanced search results within 30 minutes. This change improves the learning experience by ensuring learners have timely access to the most current libraries available to them. We're continuing to work on improvements so changes to learning activities can be reflected in near real time in the enhanced search results.
Configuration Requirements
This improvement is automatically available when enhanced search is enabled. No additional configuration is required.
Note: In order to allow time for testing, this enhancement will have a staggered release to Preview and Production. For more details, please refer to Knowledge Base Article (https://me.sap.com/notes/3560061).
For more insights on what’s coming for Learning, please make sure to follow the updates on the Customer Community as we will be publishing more information soon and stay tuned for upcoming webinar announcements! We want to hear from you too: leave us your questions and feedback in the comments section below.
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