Creating learn-it-alls at Microsoft with Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning Hub

At Microsoft, we’re dedicated to fostering a culture of growth mindset by promoting continuous learning. Learning is core to the employee experience, and recent data shows that if employees can’t learn and grow, they’ll leave. We want our employees to engage in learning, build new skills, advance in their career, and better understand how they can grow and evolve to meet the continually changing world around them. Microsoft Viva Learning in Microsoft Teams combined with LinkedIn Learning Hub is helping us do exactly that.

Evolving our culture of learning

Employees with a growth mindset are always learning, continuously curious, willing to take risks, and learn quickly from mistakes. We’re engaging employees to activate learning at Microsoft to support a growth mindset culture which values learning over knowing—seeking out innovative ideas, embracing challenges, and improving over time.

To enable this culture, we offer a diverse range of learning and development opportunities. We believe training can include more than formal instruction, and our philosophy focuses on providing the right learning at the right time, in the right way. In a culture of learning, our employees demonstrate a growth mindset and develop personally and professionally. When our employees become learners, they learn about our customers and their needs, being diverse and inclusive, working together as one, and—ultimately—making a difference in the world. A culture of learning extends beyond the skills needed for specific tasks.

Ensuring that our employees have the right skills they need to do their job is important, but equally important is having a broader understanding of how to be a good ally, or how to be a great people manager, or a stronger leader. All of that comes back to the importance of learning. It’s just a fundamental part of the fabric of human life.

—Joe Whittinghill, corporate vice president, Talent, Learning, and Insights

Whittinghill poses for a corporate photo. — At Microsoft, we’re enabling our employees to become learners all the time across as many areas as they find interesting, says Joe Whittinghill, corporate vice president of Talent, Learning, and Insights.

“Learning encompasses many things,” says Joe Whittinghill, corporate vice president of Talent, Learning, and Insights. “We learn in many ways––even just being aware of those around us and seeking to better understand each of them. Learning is building specific skills that allow people to be successful in their roles, to have career growth and progression, and it allows the organization to keep up with changes in our business.”

Whittinghill notes that the evolution of a culture of learning at Microsoft involves providing employees with learning experiences that encourage them to become learners all the time and of many things.

“Ensuring that our employees have the right skills they need to do their job is important,” Whittinghill says, “but equally important is having a broader understanding of how to be a good ally, or how to be a great people manager, or a stronger leader. All of that comes back to the importance of learning. It’s just a fundamental part of the fabric of human life.”

Learning is not only a necessity, but something that Microsoft believes is deeply and intricately connected to our overall success as individuals and as an organization. We recognized that to foster a growth mindset at Microsoft, we needed to evolve our learning culture to support changes in the broader organizational culture.

Our research across many organizations and industries has clearly demonstrated that employees want to learn. Data shows that if employees can’t learn and grow, they’ll leave. Seventy-six percent of employees say they’d stay at a company longer if they had more support for development and learning. Before implementing the new learning experience powered by Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning Hub, we realized employees were facing consistent obstacles related to being able to personalize their learning, find time to learn, find relevant training, and finding training practical to them. We wanted to change that because, at Microsoft, we aspire to be a company where employees build long-lasting careers and embrace a learn-it-all culture where learning and growth are at the core of the employee experience.

To support the employee needs expressed by our research and foster a growth mindset at Microsoft, we’re enhancing the way that our employees learn. We’re providing learning experiences in the tools they use every day and empowering them to define their own learning journey.

Fostering a growth mindset with a new learning experience

Our new learning experience, powered by Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning Hub, is replacing existing learning portals and eliminating the requirement for learners to search different platforms to find the learning resources they need.

The Microsoft Viva Learning app makes content from LinkedIn Learning Hub and many other sources readily discoverable, shareable, and consumable from Microsoft Teams. Features such as learning keyword and interest searches, assigned learning, and sharing resources through social channels support learners in Viva Learning. LinkedIn Learning Hub provides an extensive library of content organized by skill, profession, and business group and allows learners to create, curate, and contribute to learning for themselves and others.

Whittinghill points it all back to employees: “We want engaged employees who feel they are supported in great careers, and so much of that is supported by learning and skilling. We can connect them to the learning resources they need and, through other Viva products, different aspects of learning such as knowledge management, sharing with their peers, engaging with a mentor, or better understanding how they make the most effective use of their day. It all fits together in creating that experience that employees desire.”

Launching the new learning experience required a large-scale change management effort sponsored by learning executives and supported by a program team and both product teams. The efforts included three primary pillars:

To prepare learners for the transition, a variety of communications were sent to content owners, program owners, and key learning stakeholders across Microsoft to inform them of the change and increase readiness within their organizations.
Stakeholders from across learning organizations took on change agent roles, circulated readiness resources, provided feedback, and stayed informed of the changes to come.
Both Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning Hub were available for users to use and test for several months before the launch of the new learning platform. It was critical to ensure a seamless transition between the old learning platform to the new learning experience. Therefore, both experiences remained available for 2 months in parallel after launch to ensure learners had time to get familiar with the new experience. Operating both experiences also gave content and program owners adequate time to move their content to the new experience.

Fostering a growth mindset is at the forefront of learning. By adopting the new learning experience, over 200,000 global learners at Microsoft, representing a breadth of cultures, languages, and learning interests now have the unique experience to act as Customer Zero.

Contributing to a better product as Customer Zero

Mead poses for a corporate photo. — Our learning transformation has been fueled by feedback from employees, says Christopher Mead, principal product manager for Employee Learning and Development.

Before Microsoft customers and partners ever interact with new products and services, we evaluate those products on their behalf. For Microsoft Viva, the product groups have partnered with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) and Microsoft Human Resources (HR) to evaluate the app experiences with employees around the globe, serving as Customer Zero.

As Customer Zero, we’re at the forefront of development and implementation, working in collaboration with the Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning Hub product groups. The key to succeeding as Customer Zero for the new learning experience is to envision and establish best practices for learning experiences, then use our insights and knowledge to inform direction and development in multiple ways. We listened to our global employees to better understand their learning needs, including factors such as language, culture, and specific compliance requirements. Then, we worked with product engineering to co-envision the right user experiences. We anticipated and addressed learning requirements that other large enterprise customers have, based on our experience managing large tenants at Microsoft. We researched employee needs, analyzed feedback, and used our insights to collaborate with product groups to influence design and development.

There are many examples of product improvement and evolution from our collaboration. We helped refine the process for automatically assigning informative thumbnails for courses. We requested the ability to assign relative weight to learning content to make certain content easier to discover. We also recommended that the Viva Learning product group provide an option to remove assigned learning from certain regions to comply with local regulations.

Throughout our collaboration with the product groups, integration of Microsoft’s learning catalog was at the center of our conversation. Our subject matter experts at MDEE and in HR contributed to defining enterprise grade API configurations that allow the inflow of our learning catalog, learning assignments, and course progress data into Viva Learning. These integrations, known as “custom LMS integrations,” are critical for large organizations that have a learning data services layer to manage data movement within their ecosystems. Three core APIs were developed:

Catalog API: The metadata for a course, including title, description, and duration
Course Status API: Course progress status for each learner
Course Assignment API: Course assignments and recommendations for each learner

We also worked with the product groups on deeper integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory for generating learner accounts, making it easier to federate user data and connect our employees’ learning experiences effectively across all integrated platforms.

We have several collection points for our feedback, including pilot programs, change management, internal stakeholder reviews, user research, and data collected directly from Viva Learning itself. Each of them plays a significant role in informing the Viva Learning development teams on product successes and needs.

—Christopher Mead, principal product manager, Employee Learning and Development

Our feedback process as Customer Zero followed the Viva Learning development cycle. We accumulated feedback internally in two categories: bugs and feature requests. Bugs were addressed immediately while feature requests were captured as inputs into the product group’s semester planning process.

Christopher Mead, principal product manager for Employee Learning and Development, reflects on the process and his group’s role.

“The time elapsed between collecting and submitting feedback enabled us to ensure that we understood the root problem before collaborating with the product group on a solution,” Mead says. “We have several collection points for our feedback, including pilot programs, change management, internal stakeholder reviews, user research, and data collected directly from Viva Learning itself. Each of them plays a significant role in informing the Viva Learning development teams on product successes and needs.”

Testing both learning platforms was crucial for the successful launch of the learning experience and could not have been done without the support of eager early adopters at Microsoft. Not only did testing and piloting contribute to technical and product feedback, they allowed the program team to gain diverse, inclusive, and global perspectives.

Fusing technology and culture for learning in the flow of work

Bogdan smiles with his arms crossed in front of him in a photo taken in front of greenery outdoors. — The smart way that Microsoft Viva Learning and Microsoft Teams work together makes it easy for our employees to find and watch learning sessions that they missed, says Jeff Bogdan, the director of learning for Windows Engineering.

Viva Learning enables our learning management teams to surface content from our own internal training catalogs, third-party content providers, and existing learning management systems (LMS). Integration with learning management systems that are already in place is a big part of using Viva Learning as the primary learning experience platform at Microsoft. LinkedIn Learning Hub is one of those systems and a crucial element of the learning experience going forward, in combination with Microsoft Viva Learning.

“What we love about LinkedIn Learning Hub is how the offerings are instructor-led by subject matter experts in the particular field or topic, so it’s like attending a class every time you take a LinkedIn Learning Hub offering,” Whittinghill says.

The relatively simple integration and the two-way synchronizing of learner progress and course completion tracking made it easy to include LinkedIn Learning Hub and many other internal content repositories that were in place across the organization.

“It immediately increases the breadth of content available to learners,” Whittinghill says. “They have a deep, expert-driven content experience and the catalog is phenomenal. We can integrate that through Viva Learning and make the entire catalog available to employees globally. Bringing experiences and content together like this enables learning in the flow of work. It adds to creative flow and focus for our employees.”

The depth and breadth of the catalog from LinkedIn Learning Hub and many other LMSs at Microsoft reinforces the growth mindset of learning culture at Microsoft. Employees can gain expertise in their current profession or engage in learning that prepares them for career progression and enhancement or even a different career path altogether.

Expanding the learning experience also helps Microsoft employees to learn different ways to do the same thing. For example, running agile development teams is a big part of the software development process at Microsoft. There are many ways to these kinds of teams, and a large and diverse learning catalog exposes learners to those different formats, formulas, and approaches for a topic such as agile development.

The merging of technology and culture with the new learning experience will allow learners at Microsoft to shape their learning journey for themselves, their peers, and their teams as Customer Zero. However, the opportunities are limitless in the ways both platforms can be optimized by different teams and companies.

Providing practical learning experience benefits

Our employees are the primary benefactors of the Customer Zero collaboration with Microsoft Viva Learning in Microsoft Teams and LinkedIn Learning Hub. The adoption of the new learning experience at Microsoft is an ongoing effort, but our employees are already embracing learning in the flow of work.

Our subject matter experts follow the channels that host the content, so they get notified when someone asks a question in the chat about a session days, weeks, or months after the session is complete.

—Jeff Bogdan, director of learning, Windows Engineering

Microsoft Viva Learning makes collaboration between learners in Microsoft Teams more efficient and enables a more effective path to relevant learning experiences. The Viva Learning tab, for example, allows learners to curate learning content for their teams by blending content available in Viva Learning with local or team-specific resources to create a customized repository.

Jeff Bogdan is the Director of Learning for Windows Engineering at Microsoft. His team routinely runs live learning sessions in which they have four or five different presentations as options for team members to attend. Bogdan’s team has a problem that’s common at Microsoft: most employees can’t attend every one of the live sessions, even if they’re interested in the content. These presentations are hosted in Microsoft Teams. The integration between Teams and Microsoft Viva Learning helps his team members find relevant recorded presentation sessions and feel like they captured a sense of the live session.

Our primary goal is not necessarily the adoption rates of a specific product or tool, but rather that our employees are learning.

—Chris Shaffer, principal program manager, Engineering Learning

Shaffer stands with his hands clasped in front of him in a corporate photo. — Moving learning into Microsoft Viva so employees can learn where they work should make training more accessible to our employees, but we want to measure our progress to be sure we’re right, says Chris Shaffer, the principal program manager for Engineering Learning.

Bogdan says that having the sessions in Microsoft Teams also helps keep learners connected to the experts. “Our subject matter experts follow the channels that host the content, so they get notified when someone asks a question in the chat about a session days, weeks, or months after the session is complete,” he says.

Understanding successful learning in the flow of work

One of the most challenging aspects of adopting the new learning experience at Microsoft has been measuring success. Chris Shaffer is the Principal Program Manager for Engineering Learning at Microsoft, and his perspective on effective measurement of the new learning experience’s success goes beyond the standard numbers.

“Our primary goal is not necessarily the adoption rates of a specific product or tool, but rather that our employees are learning” Shaffer says.

He uses a striking example of when adoption numbers don’t tell the full story.

“We want technology to be the enabler for our employees,” Shaffer says. “Learning in the flow of work, as Viva Learning enables is success, but to put a number on it is very difficult. The goal is learning, not training. Learning is our outcome; training is simply an activity.”

Shaffer underscores the importance of growth mindset and building lifelong learners at Microsoft: “At Microsoft, we want a new mindset, new skills, and lasting changes in behavior.”

We want engaged learners, clear evidence that the new learning experience is providing the learning environment they need, and––ultimately––that Microsoft employees are embracing a culture of learning.

—Nur Duygun, business program manager, Learning and Talent Services

Nur poses for a corporate photo. — We’re focused on helping our employees get as much as they can out of learning, not on how many trainings we can get them to take, says Nur Duygun, a business program manager for Learning and Talent Services at Microsoft.

“We use many channels to measure and gather feedback from our employees,” says Nur Duygun, a business program manager for Learning and Talent Services at Microsoft. “We measure specific usage of the product across different elements of Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning Hub. These are all useful for understanding how we can change the product to improve specific parts of the employee experience.”

Duygun concludes by reaffirming the importance of understanding how learning behaviors are changing in response to the new learning experience.

“We want engaged learners, clear evidence that the new learning experience is providing the learning environment they need, and––ultimately––that Microsoft employees are embracing a culture of learning,” she says.

The number of engaged quality learners—employees who consume more than two elective learning courses in a month—has increased by 58 percent since we launched, clearly showing that the new learning experience is key in supporting behavior change. Our employees are embracing the learn-it-all culture at Microsoft and integrating learning as a core part of their employee experience. As Customer Zero, we will continue to influence the evolution of the learning experience based on feedback from learners.

Moving forward

Living our culture means continuing to be curious and prioritizing learning. Microsoft Viva Learning in Microsoft Teams and LinkedIn Learning Hub are important enablers of our culture rooted in a growth mindset. We’re working on building Viva Learning even more deeply into the flow of work. In the near future, we’ll be using contextualized AI to augment our employees experience in Teams.

We’re also implementing individual features such as content ratings, uploading your own custom content, and adding reserved learning time to a Microsoft Outlook calendar based on course requirements. As our usage of the learning experience evolves, we will expand our measurement in parallel, including measuring skill-based learning consumption and other critical indicators correlated to our learning culture. We aspire to provide even more opportunities with Microsoft Viva Learning for our employees to learn when and where they need it so they continue to grow and build a meaningful career at Microsoft.

The adoption of the new learning experience at Microsoft is an ongoing effort, supportive of the aspire-to learning culture, and employees are already embracing learning in the flow of work. As Customer Zero, we’re at the forefront of development and implementation, working in collaboration with the Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning product groups.