Insights from the report can help organizations better identify their business needs in workforce planning, talent management, and skilling
Given the diversification of skill sets in today’s global workforce, it’s more important than ever for business leaders to stay informed about the skills used by their employees. This information can be difficult to ascertain, given today’s broadly distributed workforce, the variety and complexity of HR information management systems, and the lack of unifying connectors between them.
To that end, we’re excited to announce the general availability of the Skills landscape Power BI report for advanced analysis in Viva Insights. With this new reporting capability, organizations can gain a much broader set of insights about the skills used by their employees, including but not limited to AI skills such as machine learning, prompt engineering, and Generative AI.
With this information, business leaders are empowered to make more informed decisions when it comes to workforce planning, talent management, and skilling initiatives.
The report integrates skills data from People Skills to help analysts and business leaders learn more about the specific types of skills people are using at their organizations. In addition to AI skills, the report can identify a broad range of other skill sets held by employees such as business development, content creation, marketing research, and IT accessibility.
Top skill areas insights
This section of the report provides an interactive way for users to explore their organization’s capabilities with greater depth and structure. Users can drill up to broader skill areas or drill down to view the specific top skills based on their selection. This hierarchy-based navigation provides both a high-level bird’s eye view and the ability to uncover the underlying strengths that contribute to each skill area.
Areas of specialization
These insights highlight skills that are highly prevalent within a small number of groups in the organization, helping users uncover top areas of skills concentration within the organization and drill into key strengths of a particular group, for decisions around talent deployment, workforce planning, and learning investments.
Customization options
The Skills group customization feature empowers users to define critical skill areas based on evolving business priorities. Users can now tailor a group of skills from a default grouping, to include or exclude certain skills and ensure the new grouping reflects core organizational needs.
Additionally, the report offers a variety of customization options to give users greater flexibility to tailor the insights to their organization’s needs. For example, users can either exclude confirmed skills or AI-inferred skills to zoom into the insights based solely on AI inferences, or people’s input.
Interactive Skills hierarchy exploration
This report offers a focused, intuitive view of the skills hierarchy, allowing users to easily search for and explore the hierarchy of specific skills, such as Machine Learning. On-page guidance further supports users in navigating these skills connections effectively. These insights facilitate decisions in shaping skills architecture and designing targeted learning strategies.
Skill descriptions
When users hover over skills in the report, they’ll see a clear, concise description of that specific skill to help them understand the underlying capability. This feature provides the right context, so users can interpret skills accurately. Since the skill name can carry different meanings depending on timing or organizational context, these descriptions help ensure that decisions are made based on a precise understanding of what each skill represents.
Skills landscape report playbook
Users can download a playbook directly from the report query setup page, which provides an introduction to the integration with People Skills and lays out sample scenarios with step-by-step instructions tied to common organizational business questions. It also includes a breakdown of the data output, along with high-level instructions on how to join datasets for users who want to perform custom analyses, build their own reports, or combine the data with additional sources. This resource enhances the usability of the report for users, whether they’re first starting to explore the insights or conduct deeper analytical work.
Tutorial and scripts on GitHub for connecting People Skills to Viva Insights data
The tutorial helps users take the next step by connecting the People Skills dataset with other datasets such as Copilot and collaboration data in Viva Insights to answer big business questions to go beyond what the out-of-the-box report provides.
The guide walks through practical, real-world scenarios, from identifying subject-matter experts in specific skill areas to mapping broader capability clusters and uncovering gaps in skills, such as:
- How many people are using Prompt Engineering skills in our organization, and which departments have them?
- Are employees with AI-related skills more likely to adopt Copilot?
Each scenario includes clear explanations and is supported by ready-to-use R and Python code samples. This makes advanced analysis more accessible by letting users focus on the business questions while the provided scripts take on the heavier technical work.
Publishing the report to the Viva Insights web app
Analysts can publish the Skills landscape report directly to leaders in the Viva Insights web app. Leaders can view the aggregate report with data automatically scoped to their team, making the insights more relevant and easier to consume and act on. This capability streamlines delivery, reduces manual data sharing, and ensures leaders have timely, relevant insights to support decision-making.
Learn more about publishing reports.
The Skills landscape report is available to all customers who have eligible licenses to access People Skills and Viva Insights. Learn more about this exciting new report, how to set it up, and access and interpret its insights.
Microsoft