Viva Learning – Taking control of your learning journey!

There’s a war for talent underway which has pushed reskilling and acumen development up the Senior Leader agenda. 60% of respondents to PwC’s 2022 Global Digital Insights Survey say they expect an increase in cybercrime and had it as their number one concern. People who understand the dangers can be businesses’ strongest shield against cyber risks – making it business-critical to embed cyber awareness and literacy across the workforce.

This is a singular example of where learning becomes a vital part of the organisation. Whether you’re an expert in your field or have just changed professions, there is always an opportunity to learn. We live in a world of innovation, and developments are constantly taking place. As a result, there is a huge amount of information shared across the internet that can create a foundation for your learning. The challenge is how do you find the right resources to benefit and track your learning.

People also have different learning preferences. Adult learning theory tells us adults learn faster when drawing from their own experiences and references. It also tells us that learning needs arise quickly, and it’s best to address these quickly.

Based on this data and adult learning theory, learning needs to be more engaging. And seamlessly integrated into places where people are already spending their time at work. Microsoft’s Viva Learning platform addresses some of these challenges and puts the learning into the central part of Microsoft 365 people already use, namely Microsoft Teams and Viva Learning. 

What is Viva Learning?

Viva Learning is the last of the 4 core elements of the Microsoft Viva suite of tools that comes as part of the “Employee Experience” suite of tools included in Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise plans. Similar to Viva Insights, there are base features that are included and a few features only available in the upgrade to a full Microsoft Viva / Analytics plan license, which we will explain during the article.

Microsoft Teams offers this training application to give employees the chance to easily access content in a central location from a whole variety of different sources. The core three parts of Viva Learning are Microsoft Learn, Microsoft 365 Training and LinkedIn Learning but other sources can then be added as your own custom content.

In Viva Learning, you can view courses directly, review course details, and bookmark courses for later. The AI-powered recommendations are designed to automatically detect what skills are relevant to you and suggest educational tools to learn those skills. Here are some of the primary benefits:

• Discover relevant content: Search content from variety of partners and learning management systems and develop new skills with personalised recommendations. 
• Share with colleagues: Share learning suggestions in Teams message, chat, meeting, or email. Track your progress and curate selections by adding a learning tab to a Teams channel.  
• Track your learning journey: Access bookmarked learning items, recently viewed courses, content assigned from your learning management system, and recommendations in the My Learning view

Discover and share skills, recommend and track learning content, and access all learning content in one place with Viva Learning while encouraging a culture of growth to help colleagues reach their full potential.

Promoting a learning culture with Viva

Viva Learning brings all your learning into one place, with powerful social features and recommendations that makes learning a natural part of your day. It accelerates onboarding and upskilling, and it fosters a culture of individual and organisational learning by helping people learn in the flow of their work in Microsoft Teams.

Due to the pandemic and the rise in remote working, Microsoft Teams has become a central hub where many people now spend their days at work. As a result, it makes sense to bring training content to an application employees already use rather than browsing elsewhere.

With internal training, the most common challenges that are discussed are time restraints, information overload, and ineffective training methods. Viva Learning deals with these problems by enabling employees to consume one-hour courses in 1–2-minute chunks. The courses suggested to them are also based on their interests and roles.

Additional Features

For Managers and Leaders, there are some excellent benefits as well. With the ability to browse through available content and share this with employees and colleagues this can really help and facilitate them learning new skills. There is also the ability to create learning journeys and schedules on employees behalf and even check on the progress they are making. This may not be relevant for every team and we have seen several HR departments, or People Development Officers, take this role on and be able to report back to Leaders for their relevant team. As mentioned earlier though, this is one of the premium functions that requires additional licensing.

Along with these recommendations and management features, the additional licensing will also allow for connecting to a custom Learning Management System, such as Microsoft SharePoint, along admin controls for featured content.

So, what does the arrival of Viva Learning mean for how businesses train their employees? 

Viva Learning attempts to overcome some of the most common challenges in training employees. If people have to go out of their way to find learning, it is relatively unlikely that they will do it. Additionally, because there is now so much training available, it can be tough for individual employees to choose what to focus on. Bringing the most relevant training to individuals means they’ll be more likely to learn.

The Viva Learning app is fundamentally a training content aggregator. In this sense it does not really replace any other training environments. Instead, it enhances and complements your existing investments in business training and helps you to make more use of them.

Considering a lot of the Viva features come out of the box in Microsoft 365 subscriptions, it seems like an obvious choice for organisations to turn on and use as it provides you with all the resources to strengthen your skills and grow your knowledge remotely. For organisations using an existing Learning Management System, Viva Learning is a great way to complement their system and brings those LMS features into Teams.

Empower yourself and those around you by taking control of your learning journey.