SAP SuccessFactors 2H 2021 What’s New in Career Development

SAP has announced the latest updates and changes for SuccessFactors for the second half of 2021.

Preview release will be October 15 and production will be released November 19.  You can view the full set of documentation in the What’s New Viewer here. For full details on the release cycle, check out the SAP SuccessFactors official product updates blog here. 

For tips on how to manage a release, check out our blog here. 

There are not a lot of new features for Career Development in this release. There are some updates for Mentoring and for early adopters, the latest version of Goal Management and Career Explorer have new functionality.

For your convenience, we’ve summarized the highlights of what’s new for 2H 2021 Career Development below.

Mentoring

General Availability – Universal Updates

The universal updates for Mentoring relate to mentoring email notifications.

Improved Email Notifications

With the new release, there are changes to some of the mentoring email notifications. Some links have been added or removed and some of the messages have been made more concise.

The mentor invitation email notification has been updated. Now there is a link that goes directly to the mentoring program to accept the invitation to participate. An example is shown below.

The program link has been removed from the email notification that goes out to pending mentees when their requested mentor becomes unavailable. Here is an example of the new email notification.

Stop Email Notifications to Matched Mentees About Mentor Availability

Currently any mentee that is linked to a mentor will received an email notification when the mentor becomes unavailable as a recommended mentor for new mentees.

Similarly, when the mentor becomes available again, the mentees already in a relationship with a mentor would be notified. An example is shown below.

Sending a notification to existing mentees when their mentor becomes unavailable caused confusion. It was not clear to existing mentees that their mentor was still available to them.

Mentees already accepted by a mentor will no longer be notified when the mentor becomes available or unavailable as a recommended mentor to others joining the program. The existing mentees will still have the mentor relationship but any employees searching for a mentor will not see the unavailable mentor to select from.

General Availability – Admin Opt-Ins

If you are using the latest Home Page, managers will be able to approve or decline employee requests to be a mentor. A new approval card will show on the home page which identifies when the request was submitted and identifies the mentoring program. The manager can approve or reject the request directly from this card.

An example is shown below.

Latest Version Development Goal Plan

Early Adopter – Universal Updates

For early adopters using the latest version of Goal Management there a few new features that we will discuss briefly.

Mass Import Personal Goals

For early adopters using the Latest Goal Management, it is now possible to mass import personal goals into development plan through Admin Center. This functionality was not available previously for the latest version of goal management.

Improved People Selector

Users with the appropriate role based permissions will be able to search for people by name and access their goal plans.

People Selector will now include additional hierarchical relationships: a user’s matrix manager and matrix reports.

Career Explorer

Early Adopter – Universal Updates

Career Explorer is only available for customers in an Early Adopter Care (EAC) program.

Exclude Job Roles from Data Sync

With the new release, there is a universal feature that allows job roles to be excluded from data sync between your system and the People Connection. This means those job roles will not be recommended to employees in Career Explorer.

Accessed from Admin Center, go to “Manage People Connection Integration”. Select “Manage Job Roles for Data Sync”.

The new “Manage Job Roles for Data Sync” screen is seen below.

Display Long Job Role Names in Recommended Role Card

Currently, long job role names will truncate in the recommended role card as seen below.

With the new release, longer names of job roles can be displayed in full using two lines as seen below.

We have now covered the highlights of the Career Development related updates for 2H 2021. See our blog for 2H 2021 PM release features.

Do you need help managing your SuccessFactors Release cycles?  Download our support services brochure or email info@worklogix.com to see how we can help!