M365 Skills are all over the place again - what's good?

This article explains the weird history of the M365 Skills offering, which has been renamed and rebranded more times than I can count. If you want the TL;DR - skip the history and jump to the "What do you need to know about People Skills in M365?" section.

History and Evolution of Viva People Skills in Microsoft 365

People Skills, Microsoft's latest attempt to confuse users to actually give Microsoft more useful personal information in the M365 ecosystem, has quite the history - the origins go way back.

Origins and Early Development (Pre-2021)

• Roots in LinkedIn Integration: Skill development in M365 started with Microsoft's 2016 acquisition of LinkedIn, which brought LinkedIn Learning into the picture - almost immediately, in 2020, LinkedIn Learning was announced to be included into the hottest new thing that everone needs, Viva Learning, some time, somewhere.

  • Source: Microsoft's official acquisition announcement on their blog, 2016

• Early Microsoft Efforts: Before becoming a real Viva Product for a little bit, "Skills" were a side hustle in Viva Insights (formerly known as "MyAnalytics", launched 2019, renamed in 2021), offering basic productivity(?) tips from usage data.

  • The Viva Insights rebrand brought formerly independent services such as MyAnalytics, Outlook Insights, and the "Cortana daily briefing" under one umbrella, and set the stage for future integrations.
  • Source: https://office365itpros.com/2021/09/07/myanalytics-now-viva-insights/.

Launch of Microsoft Viva (2021)

• Introduction of Viva Learning: Announced in February 2021, Viva Learning aimed to "enhance employee experience" by bundling LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, and third-parties into one hub.
  • Skills were implied through learning paths, but no dedicated branding yet. And of course Viva Insights was a separate product. The Viva suite has always been confusing and kind of a weird bundle, if you ask me...
    • Source: Microsoft Viva announcement press release;
  • LinkedIn Learning got a Microsoft makeover as part of Viva Learning, shifting focus to M365 unity. It is now surfaced in the Viva Learning course catalogue.
    • Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/learning/linkedin-learning-free-courses

Evolution and Renames (2022–2023)

• Expansion in Viva: In 2023, Viva Learning added "Skills in Viva" as a feature
  • Source: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoftvivablog/introducing-ai-powered-skills-in-microsoft-viva-a-new-way-to-understand-and-empo/3947844.
• Included in the Viva Suite license - how generous, by the way - it tried to inference user's skills from LinkedIn profile (if available) and Graph data (emails, documents, meetings, chats, top contacts, and more). It was also supposed to use my favorite Viva product (doesn't everyone have a favorite Viva product?), Viva Topics, to suggest skills and topics for people designated as experts. But as we all know, Viva Topics was discontinued in early 2025.
  • Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/fi-fi/microsoft-365/topics/changes-coming-to-topics?view=o365-worldwide
• Rebranding to Viva People Skills (2025): In 2025, Microsoft slapped "Viva People Skills" on the skills features, separating them from pure learning.
  • Source: Official rebranding blog post on Microsoft Viva site
• Key Changes: Incorporated Microsoft Graph AI for gap analysis, distancing from LinkedIn's roots.
  • Source: People Skills overview on Microsoft Learn; controversy: Ethical AI debates raged, with accusations of reinforcing workplace inequalities through biased algorithms.
• Licensing Updates: Included in various Viva plans/licenses, but I don't know any organization who actually paid for it beyond a small pilot :(

Recent Developments (2024–Present)

• No Major Renames: As of 2025, it's now "People Skills", and for already over a year, it has not changed names.
• Licensing Finally Fixed: Not only is it tied to Viva plans, but also included in M365 Copilot license as of September 2025 - more on that later.

In the end, (Viva) People Skills has been suffering from an identity crisis, never having a clear purpose or even a sensible surface to interact with end useres. Being a standalone product - but with very few standalone features - didn't really make sense, but neither does being a part of "Viva", which is already a confusing group of features and products.

But at least being a part of M365 Copilot license now means more users will have access to it, which of course builds more data for Microsoft to analyze and surface to the management - and has a chance of actually kicking off some sort of a network effect.

And being free with the M365 Copilot license means that more organizations might actually start using it, and that's probably the best thing that has happened to this product so far.

What do you need to know about People Skills in M365?

Okay, enough history. What do you need to know about People Skills in M365 today?

On one hand, I would love to properly cover the whole product with all of its surfaces and features, but on the other hand, I don't know if anyone is using it, so I will concentrate on the parts that really matter:

1. User Profile card and search in M365
2. Differences to the old "Skills" field in SharePoint profile
3. APIs

Let's take a look at each.

1. People Skills in M365 profile card and search

You can find People by their confirmed People Skills in SharePoint using the exciting search that's not SharePoint Search or Microsoft Search, but is used to search SharePoint and Microsoft stuff in general.

Of course, if you search for a skill, the displayed results for your skilled people, are different from what is shown on the profile card.

Here's what's shown in search results:

(Note that my profile has NO skills whatsoever, but Gautam is skilled in - among other things - Running Backwards and Handstand)

But for the profile card (no UPA skills shown, because the AI-generated People Skills take precedence) - here's what it looks like:

And you can see the whole list of AI-generated skills - both confirmed, but also unconfirmed!

Note the suspicious missing skills, such as "Running Backwards" and "Handstand". Those are in the old "Skills" field in SharePoint profile, but not in People Skills. And they're shown in search results, but not on the profile card.

Oh, and sorry Gautam - you're being made into an example here. But that's what you get for helping me test this stuff out :)

We recently presented a session at CollabDays Finland 2025 about M365 Copilot stuff, and Skills / People Skills were a part of the demos we did.

Anyway - here's what the profile card looks like when new skills are being proposed (but not accepted yet):

You can see all skills by clicking on the "Show more skills":

I have highlighted all suggestions that are absolute nonsense and have zero usefulness.

This is of course a test tenant - but I've been using it for a long time and my user profile actually has a long history on it.

You can accept your Skills or even add new ones:

But in classic Microsoft fashion, if you click the link that says "You can add more profile information here", you get redirected to the old SharePoint profile editor, which has the old "Skills" field, without the new People Skills. So it looks like all of your skills DISAPPEAR.

But fear not! They are just stashed into a secret place with no UI, configuration options, or API access. Very exciting!

So to recap:

• Skills from the old "Skills" field in SharePoint profile are searchable, you can update them yourself, and they have been used for a long time - but they are stored in SharePoint User Profile Application (UPA), which is a legacy service that Microsoft has been trying to get rid of for years.
• People Skills are AI-inferred (or sometimes AI-hallucinated), and ever confirming any of them will cause "old" Skills not to be shown on your profile card anymore.
• Old skills will remain searchable via the usual APIs and the snowflake search.
• People Skills are searchable only on the unique snowflake search page - but even AI-generated unconfirmed skills assigned to you are searchable, no matter how ridiculous they are.

What's the relationship between People Skills and existing "skills" in a user's SharePoint profile?

People Skills does not sync with the "Skills" field in a user's SharePoint profile. It doesn't actually sync with anything. It can not even be synced even if you wanted to.

SharePoint skills and People Skills are completely separate things with only partially overlapping user interface visibility.

Skills - the old and useful field in SharePoint profile

The "Skills" field is just a taxonomy field that users can edit themselves, and it can be surfaced wherever a user's profile properties are shown.

It has good support via APIs, though, and has a long history of being somewhat useful in various scenarios, such as employee directories, people search, and even some custom skills matching solutions. And of course, it can be searched using APIs, SharePoint Search, and to some extent, with M365 Copilot.

People Skills - the new AI-guessed "Skills"

People Skills, on the other hand, are inferred by AI from various data sources and are meant to provide a more dynamic and "full" representation of a user's skills. They're shown on the profile card, have to date little adoption, and there's practically no API availability to access or manage them.

Yes, they are totally separate with no integration, and Microsoft seemingly only plans to maybe on day migrate the "Skills" field data to People Skills. Until that happens, you can just use the AI-generated stuff to replace the old stuff you have set yourself.

Nice.

Future of Skills on M365?

Will the "People Skills" get somewhere with time? Maybe! They're definitely better than 5 years ago. Or at least there's now more of them.

But currently, except for the pretty display layer (and being free with M365 Copilot), the functionality is quite disappointing.

And the biggest disappointment is the lack of API access...

How to access People Skills data via API?

You can access the "old" Skills field in SharePoint profile via the Graph API, User Profile Service REST API, SharePoint Search API and probably a bunch of other ways, too.

It's old, it's available, and it's stable (all things considered...)

On the contrary, you can't access "People Skills" data via any publicly released API. That's how nice the extensibility/ISV story is right now.

That said, you can access People Skills data via a beta endpoint in Microsoft Graph API. You can not search/filter/query users by their skills, but at least you CAN read the skills of a specific user.

So if you want to actually SEARCH for users, you better open up your SharePoint and use the quirky search experience, or ask M365 Copilot to find people by their skills.

Anyway - the endpoint to get a user's skills is:

https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/users/{user-id}/profile/skills

Yes. Beta. Not v1.0. Beta.

And a sample response looks like this (stripped to only contain skills):

{
    "categories": [],
    "displayName": "Project coordination",
    "proficiency": null,
    "webUrl": null,
    "collaborationTags": [],
    "allowedAudiences": "organization",
    "createdDateTime": "2025-08-17T01:48:30.9859927Z",
    "lastModifiedDateTime": "2025-08-17T01:48:30.9859928Z",
    "id": "9a38d4ba-9d7b-44c1-b8dc-031ce1f2a2c8",
    "isSearchable": false,
    "inference": null,
    "createdBy": {
        "user": null,
        "device": null,
        "application": {
            "displayName": "UPA",
            "id": null
        }
    },
    "lastModifiedBy": {
        "user": null,
        "device": null,
        "application": {
            "displayName": "UPA",
            "id": null
        }
    },
    "source": {
        "type": [
            "UPA"
        ]
    },
    "sources": [
        {
            "sourceId": "6cdc4422-8c05-40c5-902e-8ade707725ab"
        }
    ]
},
{
    "categories": [],
    "displayName": "Digital Literacy",
    "proficiency": null,
    "webUrl": null,
    "collaborationTags": [],
    "allowedAudiences": "organization",
    "createdDateTime": "2025-08-23T19:22:44.7658271Z",
    "lastModifiedDateTime": "2025-08-29T13:01:13.4282993Z",
    "id": "5056bf6d-e0ea-43a9-841c-8b5234d49033",
    "isSearchable": false,
    "inference": null,
    "createdBy": {
        "user": null,
        "device": null,
        "application": {
            "displayName": "SkillsInViva",
            "id": null
        }
    },
    "lastModifiedBy": {
        "user": null,
        "device": null,
        "application": {
            "displayName": "SkillsInViva",
            "id": null
        }
    },
    "source": {
        "type": [
            "SkillsInViva"
        ]
    },
    "sources": [
        {
            "sourceId": "75d4238e-b142-4d2d-aed9-232b830b8706"
        }
    ]
},
{
    "categories": [],
    "displayName": "Administrative Organization",
    "proficiency": null,
    "webUrl": null,
    "collaborationTags": [],
    "allowedAudiences": "organization",
    "createdDateTime": "2025-08-23T19:22:44.7301803Z",
    "lastModifiedDateTime": "2025-08-29T13:01:13.3573154Z",
    "id": "90ece95b-a6b0-4041-93a2-6d5f486bb62a",
    "isSearchable": false,
    "inference": null,
    "createdBy": {
        "user": null,
        "device": null,
        "application": {
            "displayName": "SkillsInViva",
            "id": null
        }
    },
    "lastModifiedBy": {
        "user": null,
        "device": null,
        "application": {
            "displayName": "SkillsInViva",
            "id": null
        }
    },
    "source": {
        "type": [
            "SkillsInViva"
        ]
    },
    "sources": [
        {
            "sourceId": "75d4238e-b142-4d2d-aed9-232b830b8706"
        }
    ]
},
{
    "categories": [],
    "displayName": "Contract Management",
    "proficiency": null,
    "webUrl": null,
    "collaborationTags": [],
    "allowedAudiences": "organization",
    "createdDateTime": "2025-08-23T19:22:44.6957137Z",
    "lastModifiedDateTime": "2025-08-29T13:01:13.312552Z",
    "id": "8dfeca02-9e58-4639-9fc5-949981179452",
    "isSearchable": false,
    "inference": null,
    "createdBy": {
        "user": null,
        "device": null,
        "application": {
            "displayName": "SkillsInViva",
            "id": null
        }
    },
    "lastModifiedBy": {
        "user": null,
        "device": null,
        "application": {
            "displayName": "SkillsInViva",
            "id": null
        }
    },
    "source": {
        "type": [
            "SkillsInViva"
        ]
    },
    "sources": [
        {
            "sourceId": "75d4238e-b142-4d2d-aed9-232b830b8706"
        }
    ]
}

Note the "source" property in the response. It tells you where the skill came from: either "UPA" (User Profile Application, i.e. the old "Skills" field in SharePoint profile) or "SkillsInViva" (i.e. People Skills inferred by AI).

Also note the old name for "SkillsInViva". Hiding the skills in a separate new service is not a new idea, if it's even called with the old name in the API...

Anyway - out of those four skills, the first one is from the old "Skills" field in SharePoint profile, and the other three are inferred by People Skills.

Guess which one of them is correct?

Drumroll please...

Okay, that was actually a trick question. None of them are correct - this is a demo tenant, and the user in question had "Project coordination" in their SharePoint profile, and the other three skills are just random nonsense that People Skills inferred - presumably by feeding the values in User Profile to a generative AI model and asking it to come up with similar-sounding skills (as many as it can because there's quality to quantity, right?)

All that said, you CAN search for users by their People Skills in the unique snowflake search on sharepoint.com, and you can also ask M365 Copilot to find people by their skills. But you can't do it via any API, which limits the usefulness of the product/feature/silo that People Skills are today.

People Skills functionality access by license

Better save the best for the last - the fun topic of licensing! Here's a super simple table that summarizes what functionality is available with which license:

*People Skills are available in the Microsoft 365 commercial public cloud, excluding EDU. (Source: People Skills overview)

This is of course very intentional, but on the table it's very obvious that the M365 Copilot license is the best value BY FAR. Maybe I'm just drawing conclusions based on my own experience, but why would you pay $12 per user per month for Viva Suite, when you can get more features AND all of M365 Copilot (still doesn't include AI features in MS Paint, by the way, not even if you have a local NPU) for $30 per user per month?

It feels like a no-brainer, and that's probably what Microsoft wants.

And on that optimistic note, I suppose that's all I have to say about People Skills in M365 for now.

References

• Announcing People Skills general availability and new Skills agent
• People Skills overview
• Viva announcement (2021)
• Viva pricing and roadmap