Getty Images
Overview of SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace
SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace's core functionality is providing recommendations for employees, such as a training course. Learn how it could help your company.
SAP's SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace is attempting to address the growing skills gap and the need for employee development.
Employees can view career development recommendations on Opportunity Marketplace and discover learning opportunities and mentor programs. Opportunity Marketplace also leverages and embeds capabilities from other SuccessFactors software, including Learning and Succession and Development.
Opportunity Marketplace's four career development areas include the following:
- Assignments. These temporary assignments provide employees with additional, potentially valuable experience. They could include taking on a fellowship, joining a project team or taking on another type of part-time team assignment to achieve a common business goal.
- Learning. The Learning section includes learning courses and programs, as well as the potential for company-specific collections. Employees can use this area to gain new skills and attain competencies based on their interests and aspirations.
- Career Roles. This area displays the organization's available job roles. Employees can review role criteria and match their skills with listings.
- Mentoring and Coaching. Employees can match with mentors and coaches. All types of mentoring programs are supported, including supervised matching, unsupervised matching and open enrollment.
The Center of Capabilities is the base for Opportunity Marketplace. It provides a framework and set of capabilities for defining, collecting and storing workforce information.
The Whole Self Model is one of the Center of Capabilities' key pillars and emphasizes gathering all employee characteristics, not just skills and competencies. These characteristics can include aspirations, motivations and work styles, among others, and they drive a number of Opportunity Marketplace's processes and features.
Functionality
Opportunity Marketplace's core functionality is providing recommendations for employees, such as a training course or potential mentor. These recommendations are based on, among other data, the employee's Capability Portfolio, which is part of the Center of Capabilities. Employees can filter recommendations based on their capabilities and can bookmark recommendations to review later, which could help workers organize their career development opportunities.
Once an employee chooses a recommendation, they can track the status of a planned or active recommendation and view the recommendation outcome -- for example, being successfully matched with a mentor -- in Opportunity Marketplace. If the outcome is a new skill, that skill appears in the employee's Capability Portfolio.
A personalized, machine learning-driven engine chooses learning recommendations, or a system administrator can make them available to employees.
To see recommended mentors, employees set their mentee preferences in at least one program.
Career role recommendations are based on the Career Worksheet's suggested roles or, for Career Explorer users, the ML-driven Career Explorer configuration. Employees can select recommended career roles and add them to their Career Worksheet "Job Roles I'm Considering" tab. They can also review job role details and map their competencies against a certain role's expectations through connected Career Worksheet pages.
Assignments have broader functionality than some other features. Managers and agile team leads can create assignment offers, save them as drafts and publish them. Assignment owners like a team leader or project manager can view employees who have applied for assignments and can rank them by how well they match with the assignment.
Employees receive recommendations for assignments that match their capabilities, location and other preferences and can also browse, search and apply for assignments. They can view an assignment's required capabilities and the capabilities that they could earn through the assignment. Once an assignment ends, any capabilities earned through the assignment can be added to the employee's Capability Portfolio.
SuccessFactors Dynamic Teams will use this functionality to enable employees to join dynamic teams.
How organizations can use it
Opportunity Marketplace can help employees find career and internal mobility opportunities, which could lead to increased employee satisfaction. It could also improve company management and workforce planning through its skills matching capabilities and ability to identify organizational skills gaps.
Company leaders can use Opportunity Marketplace to identify previously unknown talent and build their project teams.
