Viva Learning, first thoughts

Viva Learning, first thoughts.

MS Viva consist out of 4 modules, Topics, Connections, Learning and Insights.

Let’s take a look at what MS is saying about the Learning module, “Viva Learning empowers everyone to gain targeted skills in the flow of their work by creating a central hub for learning in Microsoft Teams where people can discover, share, assign, and learn from content libraries available across the organisation.”.

Central Hub for Learning: as I’m often saying “Content without context” is not something that works in a corporate environment. Making content available is one thing, making it impactful is another thing.

Gain targeted kills: creating a central hub to gain targeted skills? Will we need to rely on the integration with other systems to have full skills management capebilities? So far only CSOD and SAP SuccessFactors announced to start building integration capabilities with MS Viva. Hope to be in the front seat as I’m really curious how this will be moving forward.

Integration: this is sill not clear as MS is saying the following “Later this year, we intend to make APIs publicly available so our broad ecosystem of customers and partners can also integrate with Viva Learning”. Same as for the skills, save my seat please.

Something else to keep an eye on is that MS Viva is part of a bigger solution (O365), managed by IT. When IT holds the budget this could become a ‘problem’. Why would we need another platform when we already have an all-in-one solution? In the past I had more than one conversion with IT (and L&D) on this topic. Trying to make a point that in most cases having a platform and content doesn’t create impact or solves the organisation’s problem.

And we have the integration with MS Teams which is not that surprising. MS Teams has become the main and perhaps most used application of O365 these day’s. And now with MS Viva it will be possible to give users access to learning. How this will evolve is still a question mark. Looking at the demo video’s and reading about the functionalities of MS Viva I’m curious to see this in a live environment and be able to play with it.

The impression I’m currently having is that the Viva Learning module is just another content distribution platform. I guess we will need to wait until the module becomes available. If all goes well this should be around September 2021. In any case, I’m looking forward to it.