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Viva Learning: 5 Best Courses Your Team Has To Take In 2024!

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There is a lot of confusion about the capabilities of Viva Learning as a platform for developing talent and creating a centralized hub of knowledge. We here at Teamflect see a lot of untapped potential in Viva learning so today, we wanted to share with you some core information about the platform, alongside some key facts you need to know before you start using it!

What Is Viva Learning?

Viva Learning is a transformative component of Microsoft’s Viva suite, designed to redefine the approach to workplace learning and development. It is a centralized learning hub where your team can discover courses aimed at improving skills and knowledge related to their fields.

At its core, Viva Learning is not just a tool or a platform; it’s a holistic solution aimed at fostering a culture of continuous learning and growth within organizations.

By integrating seamlessly with the familiar Microsoft 365 ecosystem, particularly Microsoft Teams, Viva Learning brings educational content and professional development opportunities directly into the flow of daily work, making learning an integral part of the employee experience.

What Are Viva Learning’s Key Features?

As a centralized hub of learning for Microsoft 365, Viva Learning has a set of impressive features that will improve your organization’s learning and talent development process:

Content Aggregation: It consolidates learning materials from various sources, including leading content providers like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, and Pluralsight, as well as an organization’s own custom content, into a single, accessible location.
Integration with Microsoft Teams: By embedding directly into Teams, Viva Learning ensures that employees can discover, share, and engage with learning content without leaving their workspace, fostering a learning-in-the-flow-of-work model.
Personalized Learning Paths: The platform offers tailored recommendations based on an individual’s role, interests, and learning history, promoting relevant and impactful learning experiences.
Social Learning Features: Employees can easily share courses and learning resources with peers, creating an environment of collaborative learning and knowledge sharing.
Analytics and Insights: For managers and leaders, Viva Learning provides valuable insights into learning trends, participation rates, and the overall impact of learning initiatives within the organization.

What truly sets Viva Learning apart from other talent development and learning platforms is the fact that by making learning resources readily available and easily consumable within the tools employees use every day, Viva Learning helps reduce barriers to professional development.

5 Courses Your HR Teams Should Take In Viva Learning In 2024

In this list, we put together some of our favorite courses from the world of human resources that we believe your employees can truly benefit from. These Viva Learning HR Courses can be completed without your team having to leave Microsoft Teams and are guaranteed to keep employee development and training in the flow of work.

The courses we’ve picked require a LinkedIn Learning subscription to be accessed but they are still readily available inside the Viva Learning app in Microsoft Teams.

1. Applied AI for Human Resources

Course Instructor: Kumaran Ponnembalam

Last Updated: 18/01/24

It is no secret that AI in HR is one of the most important discussions of this year. While the use of AI is one of the most prominent HR trends of our time, it is no secret that every team can benefit from being a lot more knowledgeable in how AI can be applied in human resources.

This is why Kumaran Ponnembalam’s course on “Applied AI in Human Resources” is a great course to implement into your talent development programs.

This is not your run-of-the-mill HR course. Ponnembalam covers some crucial areas in the world of AI such as deep learning and offers a comprehensive curriculum that includes but isn’t limited to:

  • HR challenges and how they relate to AI.
  • Different use cases and applications of AI in HR
    • Predicting Employee Attrition
    • Discovering Collaboration
    • Recommending Training Courses
  • Generative AI for HR

While the course may be a bit for the tech-savvy HR professional, it can help develop everyone’s understanding and perspective of the use of AI in the workplace.

2. HR Foundations: Redefining HR

Course Instructor: Lars Schmidt

Last Updated: 08/01/24

Human resources is one department that can’t afford to be stagnant and to be honest, for the most part, the world of HR has kept rapidly evolving, changing, and growing. Lars Schmidt built this particular course not only to help HR professionals keep up with that change but also to help them build a lasting career in HR.

Lars Schmidt, a renowned HR specialist, guides listeners through the essentials of sourcing and securing top-notch talent, embedding diversity and fairness into your company’s culture, crafting an engaging experience for all employees, and enhancing resilience and commercial insight to address contemporary HR challenges.

Throughout this course, Lars provides valuable advice and tactics to forge one’s ideal HR career, including guidance on career progression, expanding your professional network, and fostering adaptability through continuous education

If you want to invest in the personal and professional growth of your HR team, then this is just the HR course for you!

3. The Human Resources Hero

Course Instructor: Don Phin

Last Updated: 03/01/24

If there ever was a Viva Learning course on human resources that actually understood how your HR team felt day in and day out, it would be Don Phin’s LinkedIn Learning course: The Human Resources Hero.

Don is a great speaker and this is a course that has been mapped out to perfection. Don Phin start’s the discussion off very cleverly from “The HR Zeitgeist”, touching upon some of the stereotypes and stigmas your HR team deals with on a regular basis, and will form a connection with your employees over that screen without a doubt.

This course goes into the true value that HR professionals bring to an organization, and helps them map their careers and personal development paths out. Don covers key concepts such as:

  • Strategic Career Growth
  • The Relationship Between HR and Sales
  • Emotional Energy
  • Time Management Tools
  • And more!

4. Change Management in HR

Course Instructor: Lou Adler

Last Updated: 14/12/23

As we’ve discussed previously in this post, the world of HR is in motion 24/7, which eventually renders most discussions irrelevant over time. Once beloved HR initiatives fall by the wayside, trends pass, and practices disappear. The only constant is change. That is why Lou Adler’s course on Change Management in HR is one that will stay relevant for years to come!

Adler makes the relationship between change management and leadership clear from the very start and takes his listeners on a journey of leadership and key change management skills, covering areas such as:

Creating a long-term change management plan; Establishing a project management approach; Scaling that – plan and making adjustments where needed; And driving innovation through continuous improvement. 

There is nothing in this course by Adler that you want your HR team to miss out on. For that reason, we can strongly recommend Adler’s course on Change Management in HR!

5. Using Metrics to Drive HR Strategy

Course Instructor: Cathrine Mattice Zundel

Last Updated: 03/01/24

Does your team have the right idea about what the role of HR is at an organization? You might be surprised at the answer! This incredibly comprehensive course with Cathrine Mattice Zundel shows how HR professionals can thrive as strategic partners to their organizations, through effective analysis and understanding of metrics.

How does HR contribute to an organization’s competitive strategy? How can human resources drive performance and be integrated into an organization’s strategy? Cathrine answers all these questions and so much more through a must-take course!

What To Do After Your Team Finishes A Training Program?

Once your team has completed a training program, the best course of action is to conduct surveys to gauge the effectiveness of that training. Employee development isn’t a cheap investment and conducting employee training surveys is a great way to make sure your investments of time and resources are well-placed.

Teamflect's employee training survey

There are plenty of ways to conduct an employee training survey but just as we discussed with Viva Learning, your surveys should be in the flow of work.

If they aren’t easy to access and complete, then they are bound to get lost in the shuffle. That is why we recommend implementing an employee pulse survey tool. The best survey tool for Microsoft Teams and Outlook users has to be: Teamflect!

Intuitive Pulse Surveys Inside Microsoft Teams!
No sign-up required.
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Which Learning Programs Are Partnered With Viva Learning?

Viva Learning’s course library is a diverse tapestry woven from multiple sources, catering to a wide range of learning and development needs. Some of the course providers that have programs available in Viva Learning include:

1. Microsoft-owned Content
Access a vast library of free technical and business training modules, including courses specifically designed for HR professionals. These also include more technical guides to using Microsoft 365 tools effectively.

Microsoft 365 Training

Microsoft Learn

2. Partner Content

LinkedIn Learning: A library of 300+ pre-selected high-quality HR courses with renowned instructors, included within Viva Learning

Skillsoft: Skillsoft has a comprehensive library of technical, business, and leadership courses, often requiring an additional subscription on top of Viva Learning.

Coursera: Coursera offers specialized learning content from top universities and companies like Yale, Google, and IBM, accessible through Coursera’s platform and potentially requiring an additional subscription.

EdApp: Bite-sized, gamified microlearning modules from EdApp, perfect for busy professionals seeking quick upskilling on various HR topics.

Is Viva Learning An LMS?

Viva Learning is not a Learning Management System in the conventional sense, but rather a part of Microsoft Viva, which is an employee experience platform designed to bring together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights.

Viva Learning integrates learning content from various sources into the flow of everyday work within Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.

So what does this mean? This means that it doesn’t have some of the capabilities one would look for in a learning management system. It doesn’t have all the extensive features of a full-fledged LMS, such as detailed progress tracking, assessments, and certifications management to the same extent an LMS would.

If you are looking to create assignments for your employees, assign courses, and track progress, then you will still need to go through your LMS.

While the platform does offer integrations with certain learning management systems, it doesn’t come built-in with LMS capabilities.

Written by Emre Ok

Emre is a content writer at Teamflect who aims to share fun and unique insight into the world of performance management.

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