The Viva Learning component is a content delivery solution that acts as a central hub, providing custom training content to individuals in support of an organization’s continual learning and upskilling initiative. It relies on Microsoft-curated, LinkedIn, and third-party provider courses, as well as data from Microsoft Graph. Viva Learning works in tandem with Skills in Viva, a management component that assesses skill gaps, maps existing employee skills to current requirements, and helps with workforce planning and optimizing talent usage. Leverages Microsoft Graph and LinkedIn Skills Graph and public data.
Viva Learning Roadmap
Viva Learning is one of the top components for current and future investment, highlighting Microsoft’s commitment to the learning management system (LMS). Expected updates fall into the following groupings:
Users will receive general improvements to the UI and player. For example, dates and numbers will appear in the format of the user’s region, rather than being based on the Microsoft 365 tenancy itself, which is helpful for multinational deployments. Users will also have better control over recommendations and the dashboard they use to organize and track courses.
Copilot in Viva Learning will provide a natural language interface for employees to work with Copilot to build customized learning paths and organize and schedule courses. Later in 2025, the service will provide more focused recommendations based on an analysis of an employee’s skills and AI inference of skills based on their role and activities in Microsoft Graph. Key in this area are that Copilot in Viva Learning features will arrive by default, requiring admins to disable Copilot if the organization is not ready or willing to spend the money on Copilot.
Course improvements will add internal content/videos hosted on SharePoint in Learning search, and access to Copilot academy will be accessible for users without Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, if the organization turns on Copilot consumption base billing. Other updates will help connect to third-party course providers like Workday Learning. New integration features include an improved setup wizard and custom mapping of Entra ID user accounts to third-party authentication systems to support single sign-on.
Admin and management enhancements are expected to bring more metrics and reporting options on adoption, consumption, and usage to help organizations address issues and drive adoption. Most of the metrics and reports will appear in Viva Insights, requiring separate licensing. Other features will help sync data with external systems, either using manual or date-ranged settings, and provide more information to help diagnose setup failures.
Skills in Viva Roadmap
As of Feb. 2025, Skills in Viva is still in private preview. It is expected to reach public preview in Mar. 2025 and general availability in June 2025. However, many Viva feature dates slip, so customers should not plan on using the service until well after its arrival.
The published roadmap for Skills is minimal with only two features:
- Personalized recommendations based on known and inferred skills based on a user’s role and activity
- Viva Insights integration for querying Skills about employee skills.
The other improvements for analyzing overall skills gaps and workforce planning are not listed, so their maturity level is unknown.