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Improve Employee Training with Viva Learning & SharePoint

Improve Employee Training with Viva Learning & SharePoint

Delivering ongoing training and development opportunities for employees is a key part of engaging your workforce, and an essential way to grow talent internally, maximise the potential of your staff, and attract new talent into the organisation.

A report by Middlesex University’s Institute for Work Based Learning revealed that 56% of HR Managers saw training and development as an essential business enabler. Conversely, 74% of employees felt that they weren’t achieving their full potential at work due to lack of development opportunities. Most pressing is the report that states that 50% of workers will need reskilling over the next 5 years. Without a suitable training and development hub and methods to deliver accurately you could be left high and dry. Fortunately Microsoft tools provide many ways to develop a training hub that suits the specific needs of your organisation, and with the new kid on the block – Viva Learning – you have the potential to supercharge your programme and truly engage your employees.

From the ready-to-go templates of SharePoint specifically designed to help you build your learning hub, to the sophisticated aggregation app Viva learning that brings training right into context into Teams, Microsoft 365 has a breadth of choice and approaches for your business.

Getting started with SharePoint

The SharePoint team site template for training and development has the potential to serve as an internal home page for your training and development team. You can add the template to an existing SharePoint site or create a new site, and choose to use the pre-populated content, web parts, and pages. Customise the site with your own unique content by easily adding imagery, video, links to documents, and original content, and use the web parts to feature events and quick links to the resources your teams use the most.

The benefits

  • Hit the ground running, and with confidence, with tried-and-tested content and structure.
  • Create a baseline from which you can build as you gain confidence, and your training extends.

Get Started with Microsoft Viva

Taking it a step further

If your business is more complex or you have a mature learning and development function, you might want to head straight into extending your SharePoint training and development site with other purpose-built templates – such as the learning central template, and the training and courses template. Learning central is a communication site and is specifically designed to help broadcast information and share headlines in a visually engaging way. Training and courses template is another team site that you can use as a homepage for each course that you run. Here you can share course specific content and information with employees, engaging and informing to maximise the return on your training investment.

The benefits

  • Use communication tools and parts to share, announce, showcase, and excite.
  • Inspire course delegates with rich content and imagery about the course and its benefits and share pre-read information to make sure they are prepared for the course and can get the best out of their training.

In a recent project for a large construction and interior fit out organisation, Silicon Reef created a SharePoint site dedicated to employee training – a ‘University’ – to deliver learning and education across a vast array of job roles and locations. With a track record of excellence (as a high-ranking Sunday Times Best Place to Work award winner) this employer asked us to focus on creating a hub for training that was employee centric and specifically targeted, to maximise the value for each training hour, and to ensure that employees taking the time away from their core role to learn were coming away more skilled, more able, and even more engaged.

Supercharge with Viva Learning

Unlike the hub benefits of SharePoint where you can create and build on a destination for training and learning, Viva Learning brings your training right into the flow of your employees work in Teams. Part of the wider Viva offering, Viva Learning acts as a hub within Teams for employees to share, recommend, and learn from content libraries such as LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, Microsoft 365 Training, and your other third party content providers – as well as serving any original content you add to Viva Learning right into Teams. This kind of direct access to learning, in the context of the work you are doing, and the place you are doing it, can make a massive difference to the traction of the training and the level of results and usability. One of the greatest employee training challenges is that there is frequently no real-world application, and that training success can be erratic due to irrelevant content. In fact, only 12% of employees say that they use the skills they have learned from training in their jobs. Tackling this head on, Viva Learning helps employees select the training that is relevant to them and make learning a natural part of their day.

When your employees open up Viva Learning from Microsoft Teams they will see the courses you have curated for them, relevant to their role, skill set and experience. Because they haven’t had to leave their ‘place of work’ they will be more likely to engage with the learning and, with edited suggestions, it is easier for employees to navigate the range of training available and select the course that’s most relevant to them.

It’s easy to get started with Viva Learning. Just find the app in Microsoft Teams via the left-hand menu and pin it to bring it into Teams. L&D leaders can push recommendations to up to 50 people through the app and, depending on the accounts held individuals or by your organisation, employees can browse and pin content from third party providers, see what content is trending in your business, and pick and save their own personal interests to make recommendations even more relevant.

The benefits

  • A learning experience that can be fully customised for the individual, by the individual.
  • Learn in context, where the employee can train and work in the same place, applying new skills as and when they develop them.
  • Leaders can ensure learning is highly relevant, making it more usable, valuable, and engaging than ever before.

Ultimately, SharePoint and Viva Learning can work with each other, and your Microsoft 365 apps and content, to evolve over time into a highly valuable, highly engaging hub of learning content. Through SharePoint your L&D leaders can manage and showcase services, content, and communications, and through Viva Learning your employees can consume curated training to a schedule and in a way that suits them – right where they work.

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