How to Build a Skills-Ready Workforce in 2026
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we sit down with Jayney Howson, SVP Global Workforce Skills & Talent Readiness at ServiceNow , to unpack why “talent readiness” has become a burning platform for companies trying to keep pace with AI, platform adoption, and customer transformation. Jayney shares how ServiceNow builds skills for both its 28,000 employees and the millions of practitioners who power ServiceNow implementations inside the world’s largest enterprises, including 85% of the Fortune 500.
She explains how ServiceNow built ServiceNow University, an AI powered, hyper personalized learning platform designed around the concept of the “University of You”, where every learner’s journey adapts to their context, their role, their skills, and their career aspirations. Jayney breaks down why minimum viable duration, skills profiles, and embedded learning experiences are replacing traditional course catalogs, and why democratizing training (including making it free) unlocks capability at global scale.
Most importantly, she shares why transparency, trust, and psychological safety matter more than ever as skills shift, roles evolve, and automation changes the nature of work, and why, if we do this right, the future of work becomes more human, not less.
🎓 In this episode, Jayney discusses:
How to embed learning into the flow of work and the flow of career
Why democratizing training creates global talent pipelines at scale
How ServiceNow University personalizes learning through AI and skills data
Why learning must shift to minimum viable duration and assessment led experiences
Why talent readiness became a burning platform for ServiceNow internally and externally
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Chris Rainey 0:00
A Jamie, welcome. How you doing good?
Jayney Howson 0:14
How are you all right, we've decided this is going to be the best one of these you've done yet.
Chris Rainey 0:18
Yeah, and we said that for the PR and comms purposes, we're going to follow none of the notes,
Jayney Howson 0:23
none of the notes, order questions. Literally just going to be a chance that makes me the top of the 1557
Chris Rainey 0:29
ask me, I'm going to feel pressured to be like you. Definitely you. Yeah. How's your day been?
Jayney Howson 0:35
It's been good, busy. It's an amazing show room, walking around, having lots of great conversations. Using everything. Apparently, I've lost a lot. I've lost my phone and my makeup bag, two very important things. You got nothing else to lose. I actually have nothing else to lose. It's been amazing. Loads of great conversation.
Chris Rainey 0:53
I was the you spoke today, right? Yeah. What was it about?
Jayney Howson 0:58
So I did a couple. I didn't really working hard. I did a panel, which was amazing, and we talked about adoption of HR tech and how it's a human problem, not a tech problem. I think that's important that we talk about. And then I did a case study on ServiceNow University after that.
Chris Rainey 1:13
Yeah, well, let's talk about that. So what? Firstly, why? What prompted ServiceNow to create its own AI powered University rather than relying on traditional learning solutions. Yeah.
Jayney Howson 1:23
Okay, so I'm just gonna take you back. So I'm Janie, so I run l&d for service now, but we actually say I run workforce global, global workforce skills and talent readiness. And the reason we talk about that is because talent readiness is a massive challenge for us. Internally, we've got 28,000 employees. We 85% of the Fortune 500 use service now, and they have hundreds of practitioners who need to make our platform work. And at the same time, they're going through massive transformations. So we know, depending on which data you see, but up to 90% of people need new skills. So we have this truly burning platform, where our internal audience needed to learn fast and our external customers needed to get the skills to unlock the value of our platform. So it's not good enough to give people great technology. We need to do it transformation too.
Chris Rainey 2:14
How did you approach that? Obviously, it's going to be an AI first approach. Yeah. But are you? How are you delivering that?
Jayney Howson 2:22
So we really want to create the University of you. So we want to be able to create an experience where Chris goes in, and Chris is going to know this very well, because he lives in this world, but Chris has a completely unique experience that looks very different to Janie. So the University of Janie, the University of Chris, feel very different. So we want to create a platform experience that does that, that it really wraps around you, so power by AI, so the learning is predictive, and it's personalized and it's personal. So it's the right, it's like three minute long video versus a three month course, if that's right, or it is a three month course, if you need to be certified, or whatever that is. So it's a platform that delivers that delivers that at the point of need, and we integrate that through the ServiceNow platform, so internally, you get it in your portal, etc. So that was important. But we also wanted to make sure that we embed all of the other experiences. So if we've got peer to peer learning, we want to make sure that's reflected through ServiceNow University and through your profile. If you're in a cohort and you're going through onboarding, we want that to be reflected through your profile. So it was about creating a completely holistic skilling experience built around the learner.
Chris Rainey 3:26
Yeah, how do you embed that, though, so that it shows up in the in the flow of work, and it isn't something people have to
Jayney Howson 3:33
go to so we work really hard on that, so we're continuously more building learning into the agent experience that we have internally within ServiceNow or within ServiceNow University. So within ServiceNow, we make sure that your career profile has all of your data, all of your skills, all of your job profiles, and then that powers the learning that comes through the agent experience. And so that will remind you in the flow of work, you haven't done your compliance training, but rather than doing all your compliance, like the full half hour, let's see what your knowledge is like from last time. So you only do the minimum viable, minimum viable duration. MVD is what we talk about in terms of learning. Yeah, minimum viable, minimum viable duration.
Chris Rainey 4:15
And that's one of the frustrations, right? Like, yeah, you we're but we're everyone's at different school levels, and forcing someone to go through a 20 module program when they may need five Exactly. It's just absolute. We all, we've all been there, and it's just painful.
Jayney Howson 4:31
Yeah, it's really, really painful. And also, I think we're on a journey where we've talked about learning paths for such a long way time. Yes, I think we need to start learning about like, skill pass, assessment pass, where you be. What my biggest fear, I think, for humans, is that all of our learning will go to waste, because no one will know we learn in the quiet, like we learn in the shadows. A lot of the time. I'm learning now having this conversation with you, you'll be and nobody knows that I you. That I've done hundreds of podcasts and that I've got that skill, unless they really wanted to look into it. Wouldn't that be amazing if I carried that with me within my profile, that I could promote to the world the whole time? And I think that's been driven by the fact that we've we've judged ourselves on how much learning people's people have done versus how much they know. Yeah, and I think that that's got to change.
Chris Rainey 5:23
Yeah, no, I agree. And also, like, I mean, I make a joke to my friends, I like, I didn't learn how to ice skate by watching YouTube. No, you know, yeah, just because I watched an ice skating tutorial,
Jayney Howson 5:36
because you went in and you fell over on the ice and you hurt your ass, and you got up again and you kept going, Yeah, your friends were there. That's why, like, we got to create environments where people can truly play and get in and immerse themselves and learn that way.
Chris Rainey 5:49
Yeah, and I think only until now, we just haven't had the technology to be able to create that customer. We've always spoken like personalization, like, truly, right, understands my Chris, like you said, Chris's context to meet you, where, how I want to learn as well your preferences, right? I'll be able to do that, and then matching that with the organization, yeah, making a skill based totally to be able to do that. So I think, I think it's like we're just at the beginning of the art of
Jayney Howson 6:19
property name on this one. And I think when we talk about, it's really interesting. I think when we've talked about, I think personalization, I true personalization. Like, I the I done. It's a learner of one. Like, you're never gonna say, say the same bit twice. I think it's amazing. But I think when we talk about the flow of work, sometimes we miss the point that it's it needs to be, like the flow of career as well. Like, how do you make sure that that data then feeds into the fact that you will do the next job and what that next job is? I still think we've got a disconnect between those two things. It's like, I'm learning in one place and I'm growing in another place.
Chris Rainey 6:52
I talk about that in I say learning needs to be embedded into work itself. Yes, because, like, the flow of work is not enough, because it's still something you got to go to, to some extent, where it's like, how do we embed learning into work? Yeah, itself. Because learning shouldn't be something I have to go to, it should come to me, or should be present, yeah, where I am.
Jayney Howson 7:14
And it is embedded into work itself, because it is like, what we're learning, if you think about the true like, so you don't know. And also, I'll tell you, what, if you asked your favorite, if you asked chat GBT. Now to tell you how clever it is, it could give you every evidence of how clever it is. You we need to be able to compete with that as humans. So we need to track it, we need to understand it, we need to assess it as we need to be okay with that.
Chris Rainey 7:37
Yeah, humans, we're getting there. So you built this. You built it yourselves. We did build it ourselves. Yeah, what was the decision behind building it? I suppose you have your service now. So why would you not build it? What does this look like for your customers? We mentioned internal, but yeah, now you're offering it external.
Jayney Howson 7:54
Well, there's kind of three levels. So at the top of the pyramid, you've got our internal audience. You get all the bells and whistles, absolutely everything, fully immersive, programs, in person, experiences, all tracks, the platform, etc. Then you've got this middle layer, which is the practitioners of service. Now, so we've got, we're on a target, to have 3 million people learning on the platform by the end of 2027 we're more than halfway there, and that's how many people we need who have skills, have fingers on keyboards, and that's controlled by us. It's our content. We exist to provide service now, content to help people be successful with how we creating it. We are creating it ourselves, but with a lot of AI support. So we've in the last 12 months, we've more than doubled our outputs. Really decreased our costs by about 10% by leveraging AI, but we've got a lot further we can go. And there's some amazing tools out there that I hear about all the time that can make us even better, but then we've got the bottom of the pyramid. So as I said, 85% of the Fortune 500 about 40 million people touch our platform every month, and the role we have there is to really just help our customers on this journey, like we are like at the burning edge of the innovation we try to be. So we're getting a lot of scars and bruises from going through
Speaker 1 9:09
bring people along with you right a lot of education.
Jayney Howson 9:13
We don't exist to sell an LMS. That's the important thing. We have an AI platform that does the critical thing of making sure you have the data in the right place you can do intelligent things with it. But really, we exist to be able to tell stories about how we're transforming people's lives and careers. I think
Chris Rainey 9:27
that's incredible that you're basically offering that internally and externally.
Jayney Howson 9:31
Yeah, and it's free, that's the important thing to say. So. But historically, we used to charge for our training. Now our training is completely free for anybody. It's completely democratized. So if you're a you know, early in careers in India, which we have, about a million of our learners are in in India, you can be learning on our platform for free. Totally. There's also a talent pipeline for you. There's a huge talent pipeline, and we want people to fall in love shortage, and you're basically developing that absolutely and all over the world, like Idris is our brand ambassador. Yeah, we, because of the work we do with Idris. We're really passionate about helping the continent of Africa, and we do lots of work there, and we can, because our training is completely free. So we're really Idris Elba for everyone listening. Idris Elba for everyone. This is my mate, Idris, unless you got
Chris Rainey 10:13
a message today from my friend with Idris DJing at his birthday pie.
Jayney Howson 10:18
That is a clanger Yeah.
Chris Rainey 10:24
And I was like, it's just weird that my friend was with him on the weekend DJing. And it just was the MC for him, DJing. So cool, really random for everyone, I knew what you meant. The vast the vast majority
Jayney Howson 10:43
of people were like, it's an amazing and he's such an incredible human being, and he believes in what we're doing with ServiceNow university, because we are really trying to democratize access to
Chris Rainey 10:53
amazing then is that your team's responsibility? That's really unique. I know, just story just clicked in my head.
Jayney Howson 11:00
That's so our team's response. So no, so our brand team, Idris Elba is our brand ambassador. I mean the learning side, but the learning side is all us, yeah?
Chris Rainey 11:09
So you're both in your service, in internally and externally, before,
Jayney Howson 11:14
I haven't, no, I'm like, I said, That's why learning is work itself. I'm learning as I do this.
Chris Rainey 11:20
Yeah. What does this mean for the skills and capability required in your own team as you go, as you go on this journey?
Jayney Howson 11:29
It's a huge transformation. I think that's something we've all got to recognize and like, I think learning. But HR, in general, the ground is shifting, yeah. And what we're expecting, which I think this is a fascinating human dilemma, is we're expecting a group of people to guide us through a transformation into a world where their jobs might not exist in that same way in the future. And that takes a huge amount of trust and faith and agility that I think is something we've got to
Chris Rainey 11:53
train people. And also you have to be transparent about it. You have to be transparent.
Jayney Howson 11:58
And I think there is something we can be more transparent about I did a talk earlier, and I said from we're in service now, we think we've got a $1 billion trust gap, and what that means is there's a ton of data that says productivity of your teams can be about 25% less if they don't feel trusted to do their job. That's costing us millions, hundreds of millions, a billion dollars a year if we can't get that productivity from that trust gap, and some of that trust gap gets solved by telling the truth. Yeah.
Chris Rainey 12:25
And I've seen a few companies, it's been quite controversial. I'm not gonna mention names, but I think this is a good thing that I've published publicly. These are the skills that we're looking for, and these are skills we think are going away, yeah, and being very transparent about that, yeah? And, they know, some people were like, Oh, that's a bit, I think that's been just the right approach, absolutely, because you're giving and then obviously creating the opportunities internally, yeah, for other opportunities,
Jayney Howson 12:50
100% and the truth is that there is a huge opportunity. So we just did a skills report with Pearson. We did millions of data points, and the impact of agentic on work. And the evidence is really clear that the will the future is hiring. There are more jobs. It's just that those jobs look different, and those humans don't exist to do those jobs unless the humans we have in work today retrain. So we've got to that's human labor is required. It just looks different, and we need people to feel brave enough and courageous enough and curious enough to lean into that, and that's why we create these playgrounds for learning. Yeah, it feels safe, right?
Chris Rainey 13:29
You created that, like that sandbox, where people can fall, you know? They can make mistakes, but then that's how they learn. That's how, like we mentioned earlier, and it creates that psychological safety and that trust, right?
Jayney Howson 13:42
And it's just how the brain works, like our prefrontal cortex needs to be triggered for us to explore and grow. Yeah, and it we don't do those things if our back of our brain, if our amygdala is like terrified and running away. So we need to create environments where that part of your brain, where you feel trusted and safe, just like a playground, just like you see kids in playgrounds, you need to create that in work.
Chris Rainey 14:03
Listen, bro, I let you go. Jenny, what as you look ahead, like, what you most excited about?
Jayney Howson 14:09
I am really excited about the future of work, because I think if we get, if we get this right, and we will, because in humans, we trust, I think we've got the, you know, we've got the best brains in the planet to make this work, then the future is more human. The future of work is more human and more humane. And if we're doing less work, drudgery work, and we're doing more inspiring work, and we're having more conversations, and we're making new friends, and we're falling in love with what we do more, I think that's what I'm most excited about, being part
Chris Rainey 14:42
of that, and I think that's a misconception, right? Like AI is actually allowing us to be more human. It really is freeing us up, right?
Jayney Howson 14:50
If we get out of our own way, Chris, I
Chris Rainey 14:54
appreciate you coming on. It was super fun. Maybe I got a co host now. You. Yeah, is
Jayney Howson 15:01
this the best podcast ever? Yes, yes, yes. Thank you.
Chris Rainey 15:05
No choice, by the way, to say that. Thanks. Go on. Thanks.
More from the HR Leaders Podcast
Jayney Howson, SVP Global Workforce Skills & Talent Readiness at ServiceNow.