Areas of Interest
All organizations periodically determine their priority job roles and skills needed to maintain and grow their business. These may be high growth jobs in your industry or people skills. Your human resources, learning, and workforce planning staff work with the senior executives of every area of your organization to identify the skilling and staffing needs that will make the organization successful in the future. The resulting list is your recommended job roles and skills which we call "areas of interests." This list of roles, skills and topics are configured and incorporated into the learner profile, the recommended job roles and skills page, and Watson recommended channels. Learning professionals can also help boost learning content by tagging it with the associated areas of interest tags.
With these areas of interest roles and skills configured, learners choose their matching interests in their Your Learning profile and can review the recommended "Hot Roles and Skills" page which contains individual learning activity recommendations by areas of interest. The recommended content is linked to recommended channels created by your learning professionals or Watson generated channels personalized to match the learner's profile selections. Areas of interest may also be used as a target audience selection, e.g. create a spotlight for a new customer service course with a target audience of learners who have selected "customer service representative" as a job role in their profile.
Once your areas of interest are determined, group the job roles or skills into categories. The categories are typically collections of like items, e.g. a "People Skills" category may contain written communications, emotional intelligence, leadership, and presentation skills. Within Your Learning, the areas of interests use these categories as the top level of a two-level hierarchy with the category as the title or group label for display. Currently IBM has five categories but your business may have less or more. There's no hard rule to the number of categories or areas of interest your organization may use but review the following example and consider overall design and presentation to learners when they view their profile and recommended job roles and skills pages.
Note: If your organization integrates your HRIS job roles and skills taxonomy with Your Learning these data points will be linked into the areas of interest and job roles and skills configuration.
Areas of interest at IBM
To assist in the understanding of how areas of interest may be configured and used, the following is IBM's list of categories and areas of interest and how they flow into learner profiles, recommendations, promotions and reporting.
| Category | Areas of Interest |
|---|---|
| Enterprise Strategic Skills | Analytics, Artificial intelligence, Cloud, Industry skills, Quantum, Security |
| IBM Professions | Architect, Communications, Data Science, Design, Enterprise Operations, Finance, General Management, Hardware Development and Support, Human Resources, Legal, Manufacturing, Marketing, Offering Management, Product Services, Project Executive, Project Management, Research, Sales, Services Solutions Management, Site Reliability Engineer, Software Development and Support, Supply Chain, Technical Specialist |
| People Skills | Adaptability and flexibility, Business acumen, Creative thinking and innovation, Critical thinking and problem solving, Cultural intelligence, Decision making, Emotional intelligence, Growth minded, Leadership, Leadership for managers, Learning agility, Mindfulness, Negotiation, Personal branding, Presentation skills - eminence, Presentation skills - executives, Presentation skills - foundations, Resilience, Teamwork and collaboration, Time management, Trusted advisor, Verbal communications, Written communications |
| Popular Topics | AWS, Ansible, Automation, Azure, Blockchain, Coaching, Cyber Security, Devops, Docker, Excel, Hybrid cloud, IBM garage, Industry jumpstart, Java, Javascript, Kubernetes, Linux, Machine Learning, Mentoring, Openshift, Python, Redhat, SAP, Salesforce, Sql, Systems, Udemy |
| Ways of Working Skills | Agile, Design Thinking |
The above areas of interest display in the learner profile, a section titled by category with multiple choice selections for each area of interest. Learners may choose a single topic, all or none in each category. Note: We recommend our learner's review and update their areas of interest selection every six months.
Once learners have set their preferences in their profile, advertise to those learners with many of the Your Learning promotion tools. For example, create a spotlight - a learning advertisement on the Your Learning home page - which only displays to learners that have selected an interest in that topic. The screenshot below is how target audience is set by Areas of Interest using a spotlight form. Learn more about setting target audience with demographic filters.
The recommended Hot Roles & Skills page is created automatically using some or all of your organization's areas of interest. Each area of interest may be configured with target audience settings to limit topics to those that pertain to them. For example, set the Software Developer role to only display if the learner is in the Information Technology business unit. Or, the Negotiation skill should only be viewed by people who are sellers. But the Agile skill should be something everyone can see.
When learners select a tile from the recommended Hot Roles and Skills page, they receive additional information from the area of interest record about the role or skill and a list of recommended learning activities and channels they may subscribe to.
Configuring areas of interest
The goal of setting up your areas of interest is to allow you learners is three-fold:
- Allow learners to indicate their preferences for learning content
- Provide learning professionals a way to target and report on learning content using those learner preferences
- Create curated recommendations by the areas of interest which learner may browse on the Hot Roles and Skills page.
Your organization may choose to only use the first 2 above options or all 3. The full configuration is a multi-step process. This is an overview of the process followed by detailed instructions of each step of the process.
- Determine categories and areas of interest for your organization.
- Create the category records.
- Create the areas of interest records associated with each category.
- When creating the area of interest records, decide if there should be a corresponding recommendations page in the Hot Roles and Skills. For areas of interest records without corresponding recommendations pages, it's configuration is complete.
- If you select to have a Hot Roles and Skills page for the areas of interest, a recommended channel needs to be created. This means additionally, you need to:
- a. Create a channel and populate it with recommended learning content relevant to the topic.
- b. Create a recommended channel record using that channel of recommended learning content and set the target audience in the recommended channel record to match the Area of Interest name.
Note: You can create recommended channels using Watson generated recommendations but Watson generated channels are only eligible for activities with at least 100 learner completions. When Your Learning is first implemented, you can choose to not use the Hot Role and Skills recommendation pages until you've attain enough learner completions.
Lastly, though not required for maintaining areas of interest or recommendations, to assist with creation and maintenance of recommended channels, we advise the use of tagging. Tagging both boosts the Watson recommendation training and also allows learning professionals to create dynamic channels for recommendations.
Areas of Interest dashboard
Once your organization has decided on the structure of for the categories and areas of interest, you can create the associated records. Users need the AREAS OF INTEREST - ADMIN global role to add and manage the Areas of Interest records.
To view, add or edit areas of interest and categories, from any Your Learning page, scroll to the bottom and click your Service Center link. Navigate to the Platform settings tile and click Areas of Interest.
The dashboard lists all areas of interest records by category. 
Add categories
Start by creating your categories. Categories will display on the profile page and optionally the Hot Roles and Skills page for the targeted audience you choose.
- From the areas of interest dashboard, click manage categories.
- From the areas of interest categories dashboard, click create category.
- Enter an areas of interest category title. This text will be the label displayed to the learners and also used to create the category id. The label may be changed in the future but the associated id can't be modified. The learners never see the area of interest category id, it's only used by the system.
- Enter an areas of interest category description. This description displays on the Hot Roles and Skills recommendation page.
- You may change the default language and add additional language translations.
- Click save to complete the category record.
Create areas of interest
- From the areas of interest dashboard, click create area of interest.
- Select the category from the list of areas of interest categories.
- Enter the area of interest label. This text will be the label displayed to the learners and also used to create the area of interest id. The label may be changed in the future but the associated id can't be modified. The learners never see the area of interest id, it's only used by the system.
- Enter the area of interest description. This displays on the Hot Roles and Skills recommendation page.
- You may change the default language and add additional language translations.
- For tags, you can associate tags to this area of interest. Click add tags to select from your current tag groups and then specific tags. Tags from more than one tag group may be added by clicking add tags again. This tagging will help with curation of the Watson pattern created recommended channels.
- Click the checkbox to include the area of interest in the Hot Roles and Skills pages. For each Hot Roles and Skills page you will need to have one or more a corresponding recommended channel with recommended learning.
- For visible to select if all learners may view this area of interest or a targeted audience. For example, you can set a Software Developer area of interest to only display to learners in the Information Technology department.
- Click save to complete the area of interest record.
Recommendations for Hot Roles and Skills pages
For each area of interest which you set to have corresponding Hot Roles and Skills page, you'll need to create a channel and associate that channel to the area of interest in a recommended channel or use Watson generated channel recommendations.
Manually created recommended channels
Note: Review the channel creation documentation to not only learn how to create a channel but understand the differences between standard and dynamic channels. Dynamic channels highly rely on an ongoing tagging process by curators but may reduce overall maintenance of curated channels. Ask your IBM representative to review the features for more details.
If you aren't using Watson generated recommendations, follow these instructions for each area of interest configured as a Hot roles and skill page.
- Identify learning content for area of interest recommendations.
- Create a channel using the linked instructions.
- With a completed channel, create a recommended channel using the linked instructions. When filling out the recommended channel form, for target audience (step 7 in instructions for Add a recommended channel) choose the demographic filter to be Areas of Interest and match it to the area of interest for this channel. This will link the recommended channel to the Hot Roles and Skills page for the area of interest specified. See example of setting in below screenshot.
- Confirm the recommended channel is linked to the Hot Roles and Skills page by returning to the Areas of interest dashboard and click the view page link in area of interest entry row.
Watson generated recommended channels
Note: You can create recommended channels using Watson generated recommendations but Watson generated channels are only eligible for activities with at least 100 learner completions. When Your Learning is first implemented, you can choose to not use the Hot Role and Skills recommendation pages until you've attain enough learner completions.
To create Watson recommendations for all configured Hot Roles and Skills pages, follow these instructions. This will result in Watson recommended channels to be created for ALL areas of interest and be linked to each Hot roles and skills page. You don't need to set a target audience or create a recommended channel for each area of interest.
- Create a recommended channel using the linked instructions.
- When filling out the recommended channel form, use the Channel ID or ID Pattern field and enter CNL_REC_TOPIC-{areasOfInterest} as the pattern. See example of setting in below screenshot.
- Confirm the recommended channel is linked to the Hot Roles and Skills page by returning to the Areas of interest dashboard and click the view page links in area of interest entry rows.
