Reviewing SAP SuccessFactors Career Development and Mentoring Features and Enhancements in the 2H 2024 Release

The latest People Profile now comes with Full Profile, a revamped data hub that consolidates all kinds of data for an employee in one single place.

With Full Profile, you access employees' data through organized cards, each providing a snapshot of specific information. These cards are grouped into predefined categories for easy navigation, and from a card, you can also access a detailed view of each piece of information. In addition to predefined cards and categories, administrators can configure custom cards, and then organize them into custom categories. You can access Full Profile:

• By searching for someone in the global page header.

• By choosing the (Full Profile) icon on Profile Preview

• By choosing the Full Profile option on the Spotlight.

• By selecting the People Profile option from the main navigation menu in the global page header.

Here's a list of Full Profile predefined categories and custom cards.

What's Changed

Full Profile in the latest People Profile organizes an employee's data into cards, each providing at-a-glance information. These cards are grouped into predefined categories, such as Personal Data, Job Data, and Compensation, displayed in the left pane for easy navigation. Cards provide access to their details UI, where a comprehensive view of information is presented.

The legacy People Profile was a one-pager that organizes an employee's data into blocks.

The Spell Check feature will reach End of Maintenance on May 17, 2024 and will be Deleted on May 16, 2025.

We added guided messages on the landing pages of Opportunity Marketplace and Growth Portfolio for users who are lack of profile or activity data. Users can follow the guided messages to take actions to update profile or activity data.

On the Opportunity Marketplace and Growth Portfolio landing pages, users will see only one guided message at a time based on their profile or activity data. The message displayed is prioritized according to the following list, from highest to lowest priority. Once a scenario is met, only that corresponding message will be shown, regardless of whether other scenarios are also applicable:

• Users haven't added any skill or attribute in their Growth Portfolio.
• Users haven't defined any target role in Career Development Planning.
• Users haven't marked any skill or attribute as interested in Growth Portfolio.

• Users haven't updated their development goals in 6 months.
• Users haven't updated their Growth Portfolio in 3 months.
• Users haven't taken any opportunity in the last 2 weeks.
• Users haven't enrolled in any mentoring program.

We added these guided messages to improve the user engagement of Opportunity Marketplace and Growth Portfolio.

You can now report on the matched date of mentors and mentees in mentoring programs in Table and Story reports.

The Matched Date column in the reports shows the date when mentors and mentees were first matched. The date won't be changed in the following cases:

• Mentors or mentees restart the mentoring relationship after they've ended it

• Mentoring administrators remove matching between mentors and mentees

This feature is from customer idea 320503. Using these matched dates along with existing end dates, customers will be able to report on the duration of mentoring relationships.

In the latest Goal Management, managers can now navigate to a user's goal plan and copy personal goals on the user's behalf. The goals created through copying remain within the user's goal plan.

The source goal plan can be either a legacy or latest goal plan, but the target goal plan must be a latest one. This means the Copy from Goal Plan option is available only for latest goal plans.

This feature is from customer idea 280751. It enhances collaboration and efficiency by offering a more cohesive and streamlined goal-setting experience.

We've made several enhancements to the latest Goal Management.

Here are the details:

These updates enhance usability and provide a more streamlined experience in the latest Goal Management.

We've made several enhancements to AI-assisted goal creation in the latest Goal Management.

• Updated AI tag: On the goal creation page, the tag for fields with content generated by AI is now "AI-generated content", replacing the previous "AI-enhanced content".
• Streamlined content comparison: The Compare Generated Content page has been removed, making the process more efficient by eliminating the step where users had to choose between two versions of goal content. Instead, the AI-assisted writing tool is now in place to enhance content directly at the field level.
• Improved prompt template: The prompt template is now optimized to automatically apply goal plan configurations, such as start, due, and maxlength, to AI-generated goals.
• Support for custom fields: Custom fields of text and textarea types are now supported for performance goals. By providing meaningful text for <field-description>, you specify the context, which in turn helps improve the quality of AI-generated content. This ensures that the AI can generate more accurate and relevant suggestions for your goals.

The enhancements improve the user experience with AI-assisted goal creation, making it more engaging and productive.

The legacy version of Goal Management will reach End of Maintenance on May 17, 2024 and will be Deleted on December 31, 2025.

In the latest version of Career Worksheet, users can now view the job family, incumbents, and organizational career paths of their current role, target roles, and recommended roles.

Users can view the job family information both in the Roles and Aspirations section of the Growth Portfolio page and on a role's details page. They can also view the number of current employees in the About This Role section on a role's details page. By choosing [Number] Employees in This Role, they get a list of employees who are in this role. If there are more than 20 employees, users can choose View All to view the whole list on the Directory Search page. Here are screenshots of these features.

Users can view the standard career paths set by HR managers and administrators in their organizations by choosing the View Career Paths button on a role's details page. The role is a starting point of a chart, and all its succeeding roles in the career paths are shown node by node. By choosing a role card, users open the details page of the selected role. They can also check a role's peer roles, if any, through the role card. Here's a screenshot of the feature.

We developed these features to achieve feature parity with the legacy Career Worksheet.

In the latest version of Career Worksheet, users can now explore recommended roles in both card and chart views, and delve into a role's details by choosing the role card.

By choosing Explore Career Options in Growth Portfolio, users are directed to a page, where recommendations are organized in several sections.

Each section recommends at most 16 roles. For the system migrated from Job Profile Builder to Talent Intelligence Hub, on each role card, users can add the role to Bookmarks in Opportunity Marketplace, or mark it as not interested.

Here's a screenshot of the feature:

By choosing Navigate Career Paths on the Explore Career Options page, users can discover recommended roles in a chart view. An employee's current role is the starting point of the chart, followed by recommended roles including the "Organizational path" roles from organizational career paths and the "Personalized path" roles that are highly matched with the employee.

• On the "Organizational path" role card, users can check a role's peer roles, if any.

• On the "Personalized path" role card, users can learn about why a role is recommended to them. The recommendation reason could be one of the following factors according to their influence on the match score: "[number] matched skills", "Same job family", "Progression role", "Open positions", and "Popular".

The chart view also supports switching between different current roles. If users have more than one current role, they can select a role and discover the recommendations specific to the role. Expanding recommended roles in the first layer gets recommendations from organizational career paths in subsequent layers. To get personalized role recommendations in those layers as well, contact Product Support to enable the advanced feature.

Here's a screenshot of the feature:

These features empower users to explore tailored career recommendations in both card and chart views, helping them make informed career choices and understand their progression opportunities.

You can now configure the Career Worksheet template to allow more roles such as manager and HR to launch role readiness forms for an employee’s target role. Previously, only the employees themselves could launch such forms.

With the new <permission for="launch-assessment-form"> setting configured in the Career Worksheet template, roles who are granted this permission can see the Evaluate Readiness link in Career Worksheet. By choosing the link, they launch a role readiness form for a specific job role, and the form will be routed according to its route map until completion. Here's a screenshot of the feature:

This enhancement is from customer idea 217206. By enabling additional roles to launch role readiness forms, it facilitates career development and planning within customers' organizations.

In the latest version of Development Goals, users can now view audit history for custom learning activities and upload certificates to custom learning activities.

Every time a learning activity is created or modified, an audit history record is generated. With proper permissions, users can see a list of such records showing what changes were made, who made the changes, and when. If a learning activity has been modified, users can see a comparison between the previous values and the new values of the changed fields. Note that linking a custom learning activity to a development goal is not logged in the learning activity's audit history. Here's a screenshot of the feature:

With the certifications field configured in the learning activity template, users can upload one or two certificates to a completed custom learning activity. Here's a screenshot of the feature:

We developed these features to achieve feature parity with the legacy Development Goals.

In the latest version of Development Goals, you can now prevent users from removing learning activities after their development goals are completed. Previously, there was no such restriction.

If you enable the Prevent removal of learning activities from completed development goals setting in a development goal plan template, users are not allowed to remove learning added from SAP SuccessFactors Learning or custom learning activities from completed development goals.

This enhancement is from customer idea 310257. It gives customers an option to keep a comprehensive record of their employee's learning and development efforts.

By default, mentoring administrators have permission to manage all mentoring programs in your organization. You can set up a permission to control which administrators are authorized to manage specific programs.

To do this, you can create an administrator permission in Manage Mentoring Programs → Settings → Administrator Permission Configuration, selecting a mentoring program and the target administrators who can manage it. When a permission is created, only the administrators selected in the permission and granted the Manage Mentoring Programs role-based permission can view and access the program in Manage Mentoring Programs. Additionally, with the administrator permission configured, only those who have the View Mentoring Data in Story Reports role-based permission or are selected in the administrator permission can view the program data in Story reports. Program owners' permission is not affected by the new administrator permission.

Here's a screenshot of the configuration page:

If an administrator has been authorized to manage specific mentoring programs, their data can now be purged in the DRTM Mentoring Program Purge request.

This feature is from customer idea 232503. It provides a more organized way for customers, especially those with multiple mentoring administrators, to effectively manage their programs.

Mentoring administrators and program owners can now remove mentors and mentees from in-progress open enrollment and unsupervised programs in Admin Center → Manage Mentoring Programs. They're also allowed to add mentors and mentees to in-progress unsupervised programs. Previously, they were only allowed to add or remove participants for supervised programs.

Here are screenshots of the feature:

When added or removed, mentors and mentees receive corresponding email notifications, including the following:

• Mentoring Invitation to Additional Mentors

• Mentoring Invitation to Additional Mentees

• Mentor/Mentee Removal Notification

Administrators can customize the email notifications in Admin Center → Email Notification Templates Settings.

This enhancement is from customer idea 257345. It provides customers with greater flexibility in managing mentoring programs, especially when someone is no longer eligible to be a mentor.

Leveraging generative AI capabilities, employees can gain insights into development actions they can take towards their target role.

In the latest Career Worksheet, employees can access the feature by choosing the Generate button in the new Boost your career with AI-powered insights! section on a target role's details page. Generative AI produces insights by considering several factors, including employees' current role information, their skill and attribute ratings, and the description, required skills, and expected ratings of the target role. Such generated insights cannot be saved on the page. If users refresh the page or return after leaving it, they can generate content again.

The insights are organized into sections to help employees grasp the most important aspects of their development:

• Summary: Provides a high-level overview of the employee's current role and target role.
• Suggestions for Improvement: Identifies three growth areas for upskilling and career development, and for each area, provides achievable suggestions in the following aspects:
  • Skills and attributes in this category
  • Keywords of learning courses
  • Ideal mentor's position
  • Suggested development goal. Besides it, employees can directly create a development goal from scratch or with the help of generative AI by choosing the Create Goal link.

Here's a screenshot of the feature:

By integrating AI technology into the Career Worksheet feature, employees can unlock a wealth of knowledge and recommendations to accelerate their career development journey.