Manage People Skills in Viva Learning

Use People Skills-based learning experiences to improve personalization for learners. Learners get personalized skill suggestions based on the learner's activities in Microsoft 365 and their role.

Learners can search for specific skills. Once learners find a subject they’d like to upskill or reskill in, learner can select that skill to receive personalized course content. They can also remove or deselect current skills to stop receiving content on the subject.

Note

Customers trying Viva Learning for the first time in or after June 2025 will have Manage People Skills capability. These customers won't have Manage Interest capability.

Manage People Skills

Note

Skills-based experiences in Viva Learning aren't supported on mobile.

Note

People Skills is supported only in EN_US language. Set the Default Language for Viva Learning to English-US (EN-US) by Navigating to Viva Learning Admin tab and selecting Language preferences.

1. Navigate to Admin tab
2. Click on Manage People Skills
3. To publish Skills, click on Manage People Skills, you're redirected to M365 admin center
4. Once Skills are published wait for People Skills to sync to Viva Learning. The sync completion could take couple of days
5. Once People Skills are synced to Viva Learning, Skills based experience is available

People Skills based experience

1. Personalized learning suggestions on the Viva Learning home page based on a user's activities in Microsoft 365 and role The skill suggestions appear in the "Choose skills you want to learn" modal on the Viva Learning home page.
2. Viewing the set of courses based on Skill suggestions under "Based on your recommended skills" section

Migrating from Interests to People Skills in Viva Learning

Viva Learning customers having Manage Interest capability, can try People Skills experience in Viva Learning with few user groups before enabling People Skills in Viva Learning for entire organization.

Note

Manage Interest will be replaced by Manage People Skills in beginning of calendar year 2026. If no action taken, interest inventory, user selected interests and manual interest tags will be deleted once Interests is replaced by People Skills in Viva Learning.

Considerations

1. When Skills is enabled in Viva Learning, any interests that users previously selected in Viva Learning are deleted. Users lose interest based personalized experiences in Viva Learning. To ensure users interests selection for EN_US interests selection aren't lost, ensure that existing EN_US interests are included in as skills
2. When Skills is enabled in Viva Learning, any content that's manually tagged with interests in Viva Learning may be lost. Tags originating from the content source remain intact. To ensure manually tagged EN_US interests aren't lost, ensure that existing EN_US interests are included in as skills

Retain current interests as skills

Note

Non En_US interest will be lost.

To ensure any existing interests in En_US are included as skills when your organization turns on skills in Viva Learning

• Export your organization's current interests in Viva Learning by going to the Viva Learning Admin tab > Manage interests > Export. Download the file when the export is processed.

• Go to Manage skills library in the Microsoft 365 admin center and import your organization's existing interests as custom skills. Once the import is complete, publish skills library.

Note

During data migration, ensure that the External code of interests in Viva Learning is the same for the skills during the custom skills import.

Try People Skills in Viva Learning and enable for entire organization

Note

This capability is available until year end, for customers having Manage Interest capability.

1. Navigate to Admin tab
2. Select Manage Interest
3. To publish People Skills click on Activate, you're redirected to M365 admin center

   Note

   Follow steps to retain current interest as skills to prevent loss of user selected interest.

4. Once skills are published wait for People Skills to sync to Viva Learning. The sync completion could take couple of days
5. Once People Skills sync to Viva Learning is completed, click on Manage access
6. Add Microsoft 365 or Mail enabled security group (MESG) or Security groups. People Skills experience in Viva Learning will be enabled for the member of these groups
7. After trying People Skills in Viva Learning, enable People Skills for entire organization. Manage People replaces Manage Interest

   Note

   Enabling People Skills for Organization is one time action, post that users can't be moved back to interest experience.