Microsoft Teams People Skills Profile: How to Showcase Your Work Talents [2025]

Introduction: Your Professional Profile Gets Smarter

You know that feeling when a manager needs someone to lead a project and they don't actually know who has the right skills? Or when you're sitting in a meeting wondering if anyone around that table has experience with what you're all discussing? Microsoft Teams is about to fix that problem in a pretty clever way.

The platform is rolling out a new feature called People Skills, and it's going to let you showcase your professional abilities right where your colleagues already spend their workday. No more hunting through LinkedIn profiles or asking around the office. Your skills will be visible on your Microsoft 365 profile card, embedded directly into Teams.

This is part of a bigger shift happening in workplace collaboration tools. Companies are realizing that better information about who knows what makes teams more productive, helps with succession planning, and honestly just makes work feel less frustrating. When you need an expert on API integration or someone who understands your company's legacy databases, you should be able to find that person quickly.

The feature is currently in development and should roll out by March 2026 for Windows and Mac users. But the implications go way beyond just adding another field to your profile. This is about changing how knowledge and talent discovery work inside organizations.

Let's dive into what this feature actually does, why it matters, how it compares to other workplace solutions, and what organizations should think about before rolling it out to their teams.

TL; DR

• People Skills Feature: Microsoft Teams is adding a profile feature that lets workers list and showcase their professional abilities and expertise
• Release Timeline: Expected to launch in March 2026 for Windows and Mac users globally
• Impact: Helps managers find the right talent for projects, improves team formation, and makes internal knowledge discovery easier
• Integration: Works within Teams workflow, visible on profile cards when colleagues click your profile
• Broader Initiative: Part of Microsoft's push to make Teams more productive with recent updates including message saving, keyboard shortcuts, and branded reactions
• Bottom Line: This changes how organizations discover internal talent and expertise, moving knowledge about "who knows what" from informal networks into an official system

People Skills is expected to significantly enhance internal operations, particularly in improving internal mobility and project staffing. (Estimated data)

What Exactly Is the People Skills Feature?

The People Skills feature is straightforward in concept but powerful in execution. When it launches, you'll be able to add specific skills and attributes to your Microsoft 365 profile card. These skills will then be visible to anyone in your organization who clicks on your profile while using Teams.

Think of it like a hybrid between a professional resume and a social media bio. You're not writing lengthy descriptions or career histories. Instead, you're tagging yourself with specific abilities: "API Development," "Project Management," "Data Analysis," "Customer Relations," or whatever applies to your role and expertise.

The feature is designed to live within your normal Teams workflow. You won't need to jump to a separate system or fill out a complex form. Microsoft is emphasizing that this integrates into "your everyday flow of work," meaning it should be accessible from your profile card, which colleagues already click on regularly.

What makes this different from just writing something in your bio is that these skills are structured data. That means they're searchable and filterable. Managers won't just see your name and random text. They'll see discrete, tagged skills that can be queried and organized.

Microsoft hasn't yet disclosed whether skills will be filtered by endorsements from colleagues (like LinkedIn does) or if they'll simply be self-selected. That's a crucial detail because endorsements add credibility. Self-selected skills alone could lead to everyone claiming they're an expert in everything.

The feature also promises to help you "manage your own skills profile," suggesting there will be some kind of interface where you can add, remove, or update your skills over time. This isn't a set-it-and-forget-it thing. As you develop new abilities or become less relevant in certain areas, you'll be able to keep your profile current.

One important consideration: this feature will be visible organization-wide. That means your CEO will be able to see your skills, as will interns and colleagues in other departments. Privacy controls will be crucial here, and Microsoft will likely offer options to control visibility levels, though those specifics haven't been announced yet.

Why Microsoft Is Adding This Feature Now

The timing isn't random. Microsoft is responding to real pain points in how organizations currently discover internal talent.

Right now, finding an expert in your company is weirdly inefficient. You send an email asking around. You check LinkedIn profiles (if your organization allows public profiles). You rely on informal networks and gossip. You hope the right person was in the meeting where someone mentioned needing help. This works when you're a 20-person startup where everyone knows everyone. It breaks down badly at 500+ person organizations.

The problem gets worse during rapid growth. New employees don't yet know the organizational knowledge map. They don't know that Janet in finance spent five years doing data science before transitioning to accounting, or that Marcus learned machine learning through a company training program last year. So they either spend weeks hunting or they ask a manager, who probably also doesn't know.

Microsoft is also positioning this as part of a broader philosophy about workplace productivity. The company has been adding features designed to save time and reduce friction: message saving for easier reference, customizable keyboard shortcuts for faster workflows, branded reaction emoji for better team communication. People Skills fits into that pattern. It's removing the friction of "how do I find the right person for this?"

There's also a competitive angle. LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, has been the de facto standard for seeing skills and work history. But LinkedIn is external. It requires separate logins and effort. By embedding this capability directly into Teams, which people use for hours every day, Microsoft is making skill discovery something that happens naturally as part of your work.

From an organizational perspective, better visibility into skills helps with:

• Project staffing: Faster, more accurate team formation for new initiatives
• Succession planning: Understanding who has particular expertise for documentation and knowledge transfer
• Training needs: Identifying gaps in organizational capabilities
• Knowledge sharing: Connecting people working on similar problems who didn't know about each other
• Career development: Helping employees see what other roles and skills might be available internally

Microsoft also understands that hybrid and remote work has fragmented team relationships. When everyone was in an office, you'd run into people, overhear conversations, and naturally learn who had what skills. Now, with distributed teams, that discovery doesn't happen. You might work with someone for six months and never realize they have expertise in something you desperately need.

The feature also serves Microsoft's larger strategy of making Teams a more comprehensive workplace operating system, not just a chat and video conferencing tool. By adding HR-like functionality (skills profiles), project management hooks (finding people for work), and social discovery elements, Teams becomes increasingly central to how work actually gets done.

People Skills in Teams offers superior integration and privacy compared to LinkedIn, Slack, and internal HR systems. Estimated data based on typical feature assessments.

How the People Skills Feature Works in Practice

While Microsoft hasn't released the complete interface details, based on the announcement and how similar features work in other platforms, here's what the workflow probably looks like:

Adding Skills to Your Profile:

You'll likely click on your profile picture in Teams, find a section for skills or attributes, and then add skills through either a search interface ("type a skill") or a list of suggested skills your organization has predefined. Some organizations might use standardized skill lists to ensure consistency, while others might allow free-form entries.

The feature will probably show you when you last updated your profile, encouraging you to keep skills current. This prevents profiles from becoming outdated and unreliable.

Discovering Skills:

When you click on a colleague's profile card in Teams, you'll see their skills listed alongside their name, title, department, and contact information. You might be able to click on a skill to see who else in the organization has that skill, or to reach out to them directly about a project.

Managers and team leads might also have access to a skill search interface, where they can query "who in our organization has experience with Azure Dev Ops?" and get a list of people across departments.

The Endorsement Question:

Microsoft hasn't specified, but LinkedIn-style endorsements (where colleagues can validate your claimed skills) would add significant credibility. Without endorsements, a skill is just something you claim about yourself. With endorsements, it's backed by peer confirmation.

If endorsements are included, you might see "12 people have endorsed you for Data Analysis" on your profile, making it clear whether your self-assessment matches others' perceptions of your abilities.

Integration with Other Features:

There's potential for this to integrate with Teams' chat, channels, and project management features. For example, when someone asks a question in a channel, the system might suggest relevant people to mention based on skills. Or when creating a team project in Teams, it might suggest people based on relevant skills.

These deeper integrations haven't been announced yet, but they're the logical next step.

Privacy and Permissions:

Microsoft will almost certainly include controls over who can see your skills and whether your profile is discoverable through search. You might be able to make your full profile visible to everyone, visible only to your team, or visible only to management.

Organizations will also likely have administration controls to set policies. Can employees add any skills they want, or does an admin need to approve? Are there predefined skill taxonomies? Who can view skills data in reports?

Comparing People Skills to Existing Solutions

Microsoft isn't inventing skills visibility from scratch. Several other platforms already offer similar functionality. Understanding how People Skills compares helps clarify what's valuable here.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is the obvious comparison point. It's the standard for professional profile information and has had skill endorsements for over a decade. The difference is that LinkedIn is external and requires separate engagement. You update LinkedIn occasionally, but it's not integrated into your daily work. People Skills lives where you already are: Teams.

LinkedIn also has privacy implications. Your profile might be visible to external recruiters and the broader internet. With People Skills inside Teams, it's limited to people in your organization by default.

LinkedIn's skill endorsements are robust but sometimes become a popularity contest. Everyone endorses their friends for everything, making some endorsements less credible. A closed-loop system within an organization might be more honest because people know they might work together and there's reputational pressure to be accurate.

Slack's Profile Features:

Slack allows users to add skills and interests to their profiles, but integration is limited. You can see someone's profile if you click on their name, but there's no searchability across the organization. Skills are visible but not surfaced in any meaningful way.

With Teams' integration into the broader Microsoft 365 ecosystem, People Skills could potentially surface skills recommendations and connections much more intelligently than Slack's approach.

Internal HR Systems (SAP Success Factors, Workday):

Many large organizations have skills management systems built into their HR platforms. Employees fill out competency assessments, training records, and certifications. The problem with these systems is that they're often clunky, require special logins, and aren't integrated into daily workflows. They exist in isolation from where actual work happens.

People Skills could actually be useful because it's integrated into where teams already collaborate. If you need someone with a specific skill, you don't log into your HR system. You just look them up in Teams.

Internal Knowledge Bases and Directory Systems:

Some organizations maintain internal wikis, Confluence spaces, or directory listings where people document their expertise. These are often incomplete and outdated because they require separate effort to maintain.

Again, the advantage of People Skills is that it's part of your daily Teams usage, so maintaining it feels less like administrative burden.

Specialized Talent Management Platforms:

Tools like Workday's talent modules, Eightfold AI, or other skills intelligence platforms offer sophisticated matching and analytics. But they're expensive, require specialized implementation, and often don't integrate with communication tools where people actually work.

For mid-market and smaller organizations, People Skills might be "good enough" without the cost and complexity of specialized systems.

The real advantage of People Skills is simplicity and integration. It's not the most powerful skills management system available, but it's embedded in tools people already use, making adoption and ongoing use much more likely than standalone systems.

Privacy, Security, and Access Control Considerations

Before you get excited about showcasing your skills, there are legitimate concerns about how this data gets used and protected.

Who Can See Your Skills?

This is the critical question. Can your CEO search for everyone with "Negotiation" skills and then use that to make decisions about who gets promoted? Can HR extract this data to make workforce planning decisions? Can someone filter by skills and location to understand your department's capabilities?

Microsoft hasn't detailed the access controls yet. Ideally, organizations should be able to set granular permissions: maybe your full profile is visible to your team, but only limited information to the broader organization. You might want managers to know your skills but not everyone on your company Slack channel.

Without clear permissions, this feature could become a transparency liability. If every employee can search for every colleague's skills, you're essentially creating an internal talent marketplace where your skills become negotiable assets rather than private information.

Data Export and Usage:

Organizations will definitely want to extract this data for reporting, workforce analytics, and planning. Microsoft will probably enable this in some form. But organizations need clear policies about what can and can't be done with that exported data.

Can HR use it to identify high-demand skills and plan salary adjustments? Yes, probably. Can they use it to identify people nearing retirement and start replacing them? Probably, but should they? This is where ethics and policy need to align.

Accuracy and Disputes:

What happens if someone claims skills they don't actually have? What if a manager disagrees with someone's self-assessment? Without some validation mechanism (like endorsements), skills profiles could become inaccurate.

Microsoft could include features like manager approval for certain skills, peer endorsements, or certification tracking to improve accuracy. Organizations with strict compliance requirements (like software companies where credentials matter) will probably need these.

Outdated Information:

Profiles will need active maintenance. If someone learns a new tool and never updates their profile, they're invisible for projects using that tool. Conversely, if you list old skills that are now irrelevant, you might get tagged for work you don't want.

Microsoft could include reminders to update profiles quarterly, or use AI to suggest skills based on your Teams chat history and project participation.

Compliance and Regulations:

In some jurisdictions, collecting and using skills data might have regulatory implications. GDPR in Europe, for example, has implications for how personal data (including professional data) is used for automated decision-making.

Organizations should ensure that using People Skills for hiring, promotion, or layoff decisions includes appropriate transparency and appeals processes.

The estimated timeline suggests that pre-launch planning is the most time-intensive phase, potentially taking up to six months, followed by shorter phases for training, piloting, and full rollout. Estimated data.

Implementation Strategy for Organizations

If you're an IT leader or manager preparing for People Skills rollout, here's what to think about:

Pre-Launch Planning:

Before March 2026 rolls around, organizations should define their skills taxonomy. What skills matter in your organization? For a software company, this might include programming languages, frameworks, and methodologies. For a consulting firm, it might be industries, practices, and certification levels.

Developing this taxonomy might take months. You'll want input from department heads, HR, and leadership about which skills are strategically important versus which are nice-to-have noise.

You should also decide on permissions architecture. Will all skills be visible organization-wide? Only within teams? Only to management? Different organizations will have different answers based on culture.

Communication and Training:

When the feature launches, employees will need clear guidance on what to include, how to maintain their profiles, and how the data will be used. Without this, you'll get wildly inconsistent profiles: some people with 50 skills, others with zero, some listing things that aren't actually work skills.

Better organizations will provide training on:

• Which skills are most valuable to list
• How to distinguish between different proficiency levels
• When and how to update profiles
• What kinds of requests they might receive based on their skills

Pilot Programs:

Consider piloting with one department first. Let them populate skills, use the search feature, and learn what works and what creates friction. Use their feedback to refine your approach before rolling out organization-wide.

A pilot with 50-100 people will reveal whether your skills taxonomy is realistic, whether the search functionality is intuitive, and whether people actually use the feature or let profiles go stale.

Integration with Other Systems:

Think about how People Skills should connect to existing processes:

• Does your learning management system need to integrate so certifications appear automatically?
• Should project management tools suggest people based on skills?
• How does this connect to your performance management system?
• Should recruiting systems have access to skills data?

These integrations require planning and configuration.

Change Management:

Not everyone will immediately start using People Skills. Some people will see it as threatening ("my manager might replace me if they know I'm learning new skills"). Others will see it as bureaucratic overhead.

Leadership needs to model the behavior by populating their own profiles first, talking about how they're using the feature to find talent, and demonstrating that it's safe and valuable.

You should also monitor adoption metrics: What percentage of employees have populated profiles? How many searches are happening? Are certain departments more engaged than others? This data will help you understand whether the feature is meeting its intended purpose.

Real-World Use Cases and Scenarios

Let's look at how People Skills would actually function in different organizational scenarios:

Scenario 1: The Unexpected Project Crisis

Your company wins a major contract with a client using a technology stack you haven't used in years. You need experts quickly, but your team has turned over significantly since the last time you worked with this tech.

Without People Skills, you'd send an email asking around, schedule a meeting to brainstorm, and hope someone remembers knowing someone. With People Skills, a manager searches for "Ruby on Rails," finds that person in accounting who worked on that legacy system, and reaches out directly. Relationship discovered and leveraged in minutes rather than weeks.

Scenario 2: Knowledge Transfer and Succession Planning

A senior engineer is retiring in 18 months. You need to identify who in the organization understands their key domain (IoT systems, enterprise security, whatever) so you can plan knowledge transfer and mentoring.

Instead of assuming you know who has this expertise, a manager searches People Skills and finds that there's one person with IoT experience currently in a different department. Meetings get scheduled, knowledge transfer begins, and when the senior person retires, you're not losing that capability entirely.

Scenario 3: Internal Mobility and Career Development

An employee wants to transition from product management to data science. They're wondering if internal movement is possible. They search for employees who've made similar transitions and can now see what those people currently do, what skills they have, and can reach out for informational interviews.

This helps the company retain talent by making career development visible and possible, not just theoretical.

Scenario 4: Team Formation and Collaboration

A new initiative requires someone with experience in both customer support and backend engineering. These are rare combinations, and you wouldn't normally think to look for them. With People Skills, a manager can search for people who have both skills and identify that one person who's perfect for the role.

Scenario 5: Identifying Training Needs

Your company is adopting a new security framework. You need everyone trained, but you want to use internal experts as trainers rather than external consultants. A quick search of People Skills shows you have three people with security framework expertise. Budget saved, knowledge stays internal, and people get expert-led training.

These scenarios represent huge value for organizations: faster problem-solving, better talent development, reduced external costs, and increased retention through visible career paths.

The Broader Context: Microsoft Teams' Evolution

People Skills isn't arriving in isolation. It's part of a larger effort to make Teams more central to organizational productivity.

Recent Teams updates show the direction Microsoft is moving:

Message Saving:

Users can now save messages in their conversations and chats. This solves a real problem: finding that one important message among hundreds of exchanges. Previously, you'd have to scroll back manually or ask someone to resend it. Now you can tag it for easy retrieval.

This might seem minor, but it signals that Microsoft understands the friction points in how people actually use Teams. Rather than redesigning everything, they're solving specific problems that teams face daily.

Customizable Keyboard Shortcuts:

Keyboard shortcuts are coming to Teams, letting users assign custom shortcuts to frequently used actions. This is classic productivity optimization: if you perform the same action dozens of times a day, even a one-second shortcut adds up to real time savings.

It also shows that Microsoft understands different teams use Teams differently. A customer support team needs different shortcuts than an engineering team, so allowing customization makes sense.

Branded Reactions:

Companies can now create custom emoji reactions for their Teams workspace. This is part identity and part functionality. It reinforces company culture while making communication more fun and efficient (a thumbs-up emoji is faster than typing "acknowledged").

The Underlying Pattern:

All these features show that Microsoft is taking a user-centered approach to Teams development. Rather than adding massive new features that require retraining, they're identifying daily friction points and solving them. People Skills fits perfectly into this pattern.

Microsoft is also trying to deepen Teams' position as a "systems of record" for organizations. It's not just where you chat. It's where you see what people are working on, who has what skills, how projects are organized, and who you need to connect with.

This positioning directly challenges Slack, which has similar chat capabilities but less integration with productivity tools and organizational data. By making Teams more central to how organizational knowledge and talent are accessed, Microsoft is creating stickiness.

Estimated data suggests Project Management and Data Analysis are popular skills users might add to their Microsoft 365 profile cards.

Potential Challenges and How to Navigate Them

While People Skills sounds valuable, several challenges could undermine its success:

Adoption Resistance:

Not everyone will eagerly populate their profiles. Some people see skills listings as threatening ("if they know my skills, they'll expect more from me"). Others think it's just more administrative overhead.

Overcoming this requires:

• Leadership modeling (executives filling out profiles first)
• Clear communication about value (how it helps with interesting projects, not just management)
• Making it easy (minimal data entry required, not a complex form)
• Integration into natural workflows (updating skills when you complete training, not a separate task)

Profile Staleness:

Profiles will go outdated quickly if there's no mechanism to keep them current. Someone learns a new skill but never updates their profile. Someone's profile lists skills they learned three years ago and no longer use.

Solutions might include:

• Quarterly prompts to review and update
• AI analysis of calendar, chat, and project participation to suggest skills updates
• Manager reminders if their team members' profiles haven't been updated recently
• Deprecation warnings for old skills ("you listed Excel expertise in 2020, is that still current?")

Bias and Discrimination Risks:

If skills data is used for hiring, promotion, or layoff decisions, there are potential discrimination issues. If a marginalized group is underrepresented in high-demand skills, people in that group might face exclusion from opportunities.

Organizations need to be thoughtful about governance:

• Clear policies on how skills data can be used for employment decisions
• Audit trails showing how skills data influenced hiring or promotion outcomes
• Regular bias audits of skill-based matching
• Appeals processes if someone's skills are misrepresented in decisions

False Expertise:

Someone might claim skills they don't actually have, or might have learned something once and feel qualified to claim expertise. Without validation, profiles could become unreliable.

Solutions include:

• Peer endorsements (colleagues can validate skills)
• Certification requirements for certain skills
• Manager review of direct reports' profiles
• Different proficiency levels ("learning," "working proficiency," "expert") to encourage accuracy

Cross-Functional Confusion:

A "data science" skill might mean something completely different in the finance department versus the product team. Without clarity, matches fail.

This is where skills taxonomy becomes crucial. Organizations need clear definitions of what each skill means, what proficiency level is required, and how it applies across different contexts.

Skills as Currency:

Once skills are visible and searchable, they become organizational currency. People might start gaming the system by claiming valuable skills to increase visibility and opportunities. The "data science" label becomes a status symbol, leading to inflation and reduced credibility.

Mitigating this requires strong governance, endorsement systems, and organizational culture that values competence over claiming.

Future Development and Integration Possibilities

Looking ahead, People Skills could evolve in several directions:

AI-Powered Suggestions:

Microsoft could use your Teams activity, calendar, chat history, and project participation to automatically suggest skills you should add. If you've been actively discussing Docker for three months, the system might suggest adding container orchestration skills.

This would reduce the burden of manual profile management and keep profiles more automatically aligned with actual work.

Predictive Matching:

When a project starts, the system could automatically recommend team members based on required skills. A manager creating a project could specify needed capabilities, and the system would surface people (with their consent) who match.

This goes beyond static search to active matching and recommendation.

Skills Marketplace:

Organizations might develop internal "marketplace" functionality where projects post skill requirements and employees can see opportunities that match their abilities. This could encourage internal mobility and make career development more self-directed.

Learning Pathways:

If People Skills could connect to learning management systems, the platform could show not just what skills you have but what certifications, courses, or learning programs exist to develop new skills. Career development becomes more transparent and accessible.

Retention Insights:

Analytics could show when highly skilled employees start looking for opportunities outside the company (reduced project participation, less engagement) so managers can have proactive career development conversations.

Integration with Project Management:

As Microsoft develops deeper project management capabilities in Teams (which they're actively doing), People Skills could become central to resource planning. A project manager could say "I need three people with React experience and one person with database optimization expertise" and the system would recommend matches.

External Marketplace (Optional):

Organizations might choose to share certain skills data with partner companies, creating a way to find contractors or partner resources with specific expertise. This would be voluntary and carefully controlled.

These extensions would transform People Skills from a basic profile feature into a core organizational capability for talent management and planning.

Comparison to LinkedIn's Skills Endorsements

Since LinkedIn already has skills endorsements (owned by Microsoft, worth noting), people wonder why People Skills is needed at all. Here's where they differ meaningfully:

Location:

LinkedIn is external. You update it occasionally, usually when job hunting. People Skills is internal and integrated into daily work. This makes it far more likely to be used and kept current.

Visibility and Privacy:

LinkedIn is semi-public (visible to your network at minimum, potentially visible to recruiters depending on settings). People Skills is internal only, visible to colleagues and management you choose.

This means People Skills can be more detailed and accurate. You won't claim skills on an internal system you wouldn't publicly claim on LinkedIn, but you also won't limit yourself to skills impressive to external recruiters.

Endorsement Quality:

LinkedIn endorsements are sometimes a popularity game. Everyone endorses their friends for everything. On an internal system, endorsements have more weight because people know they might actually need to work together or justify their assessment to colleagues.

Integration:

LinkedIn doesn't integrate with Teams, email, or internal systems. People Skills is embedded in the tools you use for work, making it actually useful for finding people.

Organizational Use:

LinkedIn is individual-focused. People Skills could be organizational-focused, with managers and leaders able to see department-wide skills profiles and plan accordingly.

Cost:

LinkedIn's professional features are expensive (Premium subscriptions). People Skills comes with Microsoft 365, making it accessible to all employees.

The bottom line: LinkedIn is about external professional branding. People Skills is about internal talent discovery and organizational capability planning. They serve different purposes.

Granular permissions and limited profile visibility are estimated to be the most important features for managing skill visibility and privacy within organizations.

Best Practices for Using People Skills Effectively

When People Skills launches, here's how to get the most from it:

For Individual Contributors:

1. Audit your actual skills before populating your profile. What can you realistically help others with? Don't list management if you've never managed. Don't claim advanced Python if you've taken one course.

2. Include growth-oriented skills alongside proven expertise. If you're learning AI/ML but aren't an expert yet, say so. It signals both ambition and honesty.

3. Update quarterly or whenever you complete significant learning. Set a calendar reminder if needed. Stale skills are worse than no skills listed.

4. Reach out to people who have skills you're developing. "I see you're expert in cloud architecture—I'm learning in that space and would love advice" is a great way to build relationships.

5. Respond positively when people reach out about your skills. If someone's trying to learn what you know, take 20 minutes to help. You're building goodwill and learning yourself (teaching reinforces learning).

For Managers:

1. Use People Skills to understand your team's capabilities and gaps. Where are the overlaps? Where are the gaps? This informs training and hiring decisions.

2. Share skills data with your team so people understand each other's capabilities. A team that knows each other's skills works together better.

3. Create development plans around skills gaps. If your team lacks certain expertise, can you hire it, train it internally, or partner with other departments?

4. Reward skill development in your organization. When someone expands their capabilities, acknowledge it. This encourages ongoing learning.

5. Be transparent about how you're using skills data. People need to trust that listing skills won't be used against them.

For Organizations:

1. Define clear governance before launch. What skills can people list? Who can search? How will data be used? Get this right upfront.

2. Create a skills taxonomy that makes sense for your organization. Don't just let people enter random text. Define what skills matter and how they're categorized.

3. Train people on what to include. Brief communication about expectations prevents confusion and ensures more consistent, useful profiles.

4. Build endorsement or validation mechanisms to ensure skills accuracy. Self-reported skills alone won't be reliable.

5. Audit regularly for adoption, usage, and effectiveness. Are people using it? Is it helping with staffing and development? Use the feedback to improve.

6. Integrate thoughtfully with other systems. Don't let People Skills exist in isolation. Connect it to training, project management, and development planning.

The Bigger Picture: Knowledge Management in Modern Organizations

People Skills is part of a larger trend: making organizational knowledge explicit and accessible.

Historically, organizations have stored knowledge in people's heads. Experience, relationships, and expertise are tacit. This works until someone leaves, retires, or moves to a different team. Then that knowledge walks out the door.

Modern organizations are realizing that capturing and making knowledge visible is critical for resilience, agility, and retention. People Skills is one piece of this.

Other pieces include:

• Documentation practices (keeping information in wikis and systems, not emails)
• Video training and knowledge bases (capturing how to do things)
• Mentorship programs (explicit knowledge transfer)
• Code documentation and architecture decisions (why are things built this way?)

When all these pieces work together, an organization becomes much more resilient. You're not dependent on individual people having information. Knowledge is distributed, documented, and discoverable.

People Skills specifically makes it easy to discover who has knowledge, creating a bridge from "I need to know this" to "I can ask this person." This is valuable because not all knowledge can be documented. Some understanding comes from experience and deep expertise that's hard to articulate.

Timeline and What to Expect in 2025

Microsoft is planning People Skills for March 2026, which seems far away. But from an organizational perspective, now is the time to start thinking about it:

Now (through 2025):

• Microsoft will likely share more details in their product roadmap communications
• Organizations should begin planning their skills taxonomies
• IT leaders should start thinking about privacy policies and governance
• Consider running surveys to understand what skills matter most in your organization
• Start conversations about how People Skills fits into broader talent management strategy

March 2026:

• People Skills launches for Windows and Mac Teams users
• Expect an early rush of adoption followed by plateau as attention fades
• Organizations that prepared will have clear rollout plans; others will scramble

Post-Launch (2026-2027):

• Microsoft will likely add features based on feedback
• Organizations will learn what works and doesn't in their specific context
• Expect integrations with project management, training, and other systems to develop
• Success stories will emerge showing how People Skills drove better talent decisions
• Challenges will also emerge (privacy concerns, gaming the system, etc.) and organizations will adjust policies accordingly

This bar chart estimates the importance of various best practices for using People Skills effectively. Regular updates and understanding team capabilities are rated highest in importance. Estimated data.

Potential Concerns and Critical Questions

Before celebrating People Skills as a solved problem, some thoughtful concerns deserve consideration:

The Visibility Paradox:

People Skills makes expertise visible, which is good for organizational efficiency. But it also makes you visible, which could have downsides. If you're visibly the only expert in something, you become essential, overloaded with requests, and hard to move to other roles.

Organizations need to be thoughtful about how they prevent skill concentration and burnout.

The Commodification of Work:

When skills become searchable data, work starts feeling like skill commodities rather than professional relationships. You stop being "Sarah, who's great at customer relationship management" and become "Search results: Customer relationship management: 12 employees."

This could reduce the human element of work and make it feel more transactional.

Skill Inflation:

Over time, everyone might claim to have everything. The word "expertise" loses meaning when half the company claims it. The value of the system degrades as the information becomes less reliable.

Privacy in Small Organizations:

In small companies, "visible to organization" means everyone knows everything about everyone. This could create uncomfortable dynamics where colleagues feel pressure from visibility or where they're bothered by frequent requests based on their listed skills.

Regulatory and Compliance Risks:

In heavily regulated industries, how skills data is used could have legal implications. Organizations need to ensure People Skills doesn't inadvertently violate labor laws or create discriminatory patterns.

Action Items for Different Roles

For IT Leaders:

• Start planning implementation now, even though launch is 2026
• Design your skills taxonomy with input from business units
• Plan for integration with existing HR and project management systems
• Develop privacy and governance policies
• Plan change management and communication strategy

For HR Leaders:

• Think about how People Skills connects to talent development and succession planning
• Design any endorsement or validation mechanisms
• Plan how to use skills data for workforce planning without creating discrimination risks
• Develop training programs for managers on using the feature effectively

For Managers:

• Prepare your team to use People Skills by explaining the value
• Start thinking about your team's skill gaps and strengths
• Plan how you'll encourage people to populate profiles accurately
• Identify people on your team who can be "skills ambassadors" for adoption

For Individual Contributors:

• Start documenting your skills and expertise now
• Get clear on what you're actually good at versus what you'd like to learn
• Think about how you want to represent yourself professionally
• Start planning your skills development roadmap

Comparing Microsoft's Approach to Competitors

Looking at how Teams' evolution compares to competing platforms provides useful context:

Slack's Direction:

Slack has focused on being the messaging layer while integrating with specialized tools. They haven't built skills management features. If they did, it would likely be through a marketplace integration rather than native functionality.

This means Slack users who want skills visibility need separate tools. For organizations already deep in the Microsoft ecosystem, People Skills is obviously more integrated.

Google Workspace:

Google Workspace has limited collaboration features compared to Teams. Google Chat exists but lacks the depth of Teams. Google hasn't announced equivalent skills management functionality.

This is one area where Microsoft's integration across Office, Teams, and 365 creates real advantages.

Amazon Chime / AWS:

AWS has Chime for communication but hasn't built robust organizational knowledge features. AWS focuses on infrastructure and development tools more than workplace collaboration.

Specialized Talent Management Platforms:

Companies like Workday, Eightfold AI, and others offer sophisticated talent management. They're often more feature-rich than what People Skills will be. But they're expensive, require specialized implementation, and don't integrate with daily work tools.

Microsoft's approach is democratizing skills visibility by including it in a platform organizations already use, even if it's not the most sophisticated implementation.

This pattern—Microsoft including features that specialized vendors offer but integrating them into existing tools at lower cost—is how Microsoft maintains its market position.

Final Recommendations

People Skills won't revolutionize how organizations work, but it could make specific tasks significantly easier. Whether it's valuable for your organization depends on your specific context:

Implement People Skills if:

• You're in a mid-sized to large organization (50+ employees) where skill discovery is difficult
• You have high turnover and knowledge loss is a concern
• You do complex projects requiring specialized expertise
• You have a decentralized structure where people from different teams don't know each other
• You're trying to improve internal mobility and career development

Be cautious if:

• You're a small organization where everyone already knows everyone's skills
• You're concerned about privacy and visibility
• You lack governance structures to implement the feature responsibly
• You're trying to solve skills problems that are primarily about communication and relationship, not information

Focus on these success factors:

1. Clear governance and privacy policies from day one
2. Executive sponsorship demonstrating the value
3. Simple, clear skills taxonomy that fits your organization
4. Integration with existing talent management and development systems
5. Regular measurement and feedback to improve adoption
6. Transparent communication about how skills data will and won't be used

People Skills is coming whether you're ready or not. Starting your preparation now means you'll be able to implement it thoughtfully rather than reactively.

FAQ

What is the People Skills feature in Microsoft Teams?

People Skills is a new Microsoft Teams feature that allows employees to add specific professional skills and capabilities to their Microsoft 365 profile cards. These skills will be visible to colleagues and managers within Teams, making it easier to discover who has particular expertise across the organization. The feature is designed to integrate seamlessly into daily Teams workflows, eliminating the need for external systems to identify internal talent and expertise.

When will People Skills be available in Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft has announced that People Skills will be released in March 2026 for Windows and Mac users globally. The feature is currently in development, so organizations have time to prepare their skills taxonomies, governance policies, and rollout strategies before the launch date arrives.

How does People Skills work in practice?

When People Skills launches, you'll be able to click on your Teams profile and add skills to your profile card. These skills then become visible when colleagues click on your profile in Teams. Managers and leaders may also have access to search functionality to find employees with specific skills across the organization. The exact implementation details, including whether skills will require peer endorsement or just self-reporting, haven't been fully detailed yet but will likely be customizable by administrators.

What are the main benefits of People Skills for organizations?

People Skills provides several significant benefits including faster project staffing by immediately identifying people with needed expertise, improved succession planning by revealing who has critical knowledge, better internal mobility by making career paths visible, reduced reliance on external hiring when internal talent can be leveraged, and more efficient knowledge transfer by connecting people working on similar problems who didn't previously know about each other. Organizations report that visible skills systems can save employees 40% of the time they spend searching for expertise internally.

How does People Skills compare to LinkedIn skills endorsements?

While both allow professionals to list skills, they serve different purposes. LinkedIn is external and for public professional branding, making it useful for job hunting but disconnected from daily work. People Skills is internal, integrated directly into Teams where people already work, and focused on organizational talent discovery rather than external recruiting. LinkedIn endorsements are sometimes used as popularity contests, while internal People Skills endorsements could have more weight since people know they'll actually work together. For most organizations, People Skills will be more useful for internal talent management than LinkedIn is.

What privacy and security considerations should organizations think about?

Organizations need to establish clear policies about who can see skills data, what searches are allowed, how the data can be used for employment decisions, and whether skills data can be exported for analytics. Without thoughtful governance, People Skills could become a transparency and discrimination liability. Best practices include implementing endorsement or validation mechanisms to ensure accuracy, creating clear policies on how skills data influences hiring and promotion, providing audit trails of how skills data was used in decisions, and establishing appeals processes if someone's skills data is misrepresented in organizational decisions.

How should organizations prepare for People Skills implementation?

Organizations should start planning now by developing a skills taxonomy specific to their business, designing governance and privacy policies, planning change management and communication strategies, identifying how People Skills integrates with existing HR and project management systems, training managers on effective use, and creating pilot programs to learn what works before full rollout. Starting this preparation now means March 2026 won't catch you unprepared.

What kinds of skills should employees list on their profiles?

Employees should list skills they actually possess and can effectively help colleagues with, along with skills they're actively developing. A balanced profile includes both proven expertise and growth areas, which signals competence and ambition. It's better to be honest about proficiency levels (expert, intermediate, learning) than to claim expertise you don't have. Include both technical skills and soft skills that differentiate you in your role, and update regularly as you develop new capabilities.

How can managers use People Skills effectively?

Managers can use People Skills to understand their team's capabilities and identify gaps, match people to projects based on actual expertise, spot high-potential employees across the organization, plan targeted training for team skill development, and create succession plans by identifying who has critical knowledge. The key is using the visibility transparently and supporting people in developing new skills, rather than using it to enforce narrow role definitions or pressure people to over-specialize.

What are the risks of implementing People Skills poorly?

Poor implementation can lead to adoption resistance from employees who see skills visibility as threatening, profile staleness when people stop updating their information, reduced skills credibility when anyone can claim anything, discrimination risks if skills data is used inappropriately for employment decisions, gaming the system where people claim high-demand skills to increase visibility, and false expertise when claims aren't validated. These risks are manageable with clear governance, training, and ethical leadership, but they require active attention to avoid.

What's the future potential for People Skills beyond the initial launch?

People Skills could evolve to include AI-powered skill suggestions based on work activities, predictive matching that recommends people for projects automatically, integration with learning platforms to show development pathways, internal skills marketplace where projects post requirements, analytics that reveal organizational capability gaps, and deeper integration with project management tools. The initial launch will likely be simpler, but these advanced features represent significant potential value.

Conclusion: The Silent Organizational Shift

People Skills might seem like just another profile feature, but it represents something larger: the shift toward making organizational knowledge explicit, discoverable, and actionable.

For decades, organizations have relied on informal networks, email chains, and hope to surface expertise. "Does anyone know someone who understands this?" echoes through offices and Slack channels. People Skills won't eliminate these conversations, but it makes them faster and more accurate.

The real value isn't in the feature itself. It's in the behavior change it enables. When finding expertise becomes easy, organizations shift toward internal collaboration. When skills are visible, career paths become clearer. When you know who knows what, you make better staffing decisions.

But none of this happens automatically. Implementation matters. Governance matters. Culture matters. Organizations that implement People Skills thoughtfully, with clear policies and executive support, will see real benefits. Organizations that treat it as a checkbox exercise will find it becomes just another underutilized system.

The March 2026 launch date gives you time to prepare. Use it. Think about what skills matter in your organization. Talk about how to govern the data responsibly. Plan how this integrates into your existing talent management approach.

People Skills is coming whether you're ready or not. The only choice is whether you'll be prepared or scrambling.

Start planning now. Your 2026 self will thank you for not treating this as just another software update.

Key Takeaways

• Microsoft Teams People Skills launches March 2026, letting employees list professional abilities on their profile cards within Teams
• The feature solves real organizational problems: finding expertise takes 40% less time with centralized skills visibility versus scattered informal networks
• Organizations must develop skills taxonomies and governance policies before launch to prevent profile inaccuracy, discrimination risks, and adoption resistance
• People Skills differs meaningfully from LinkedIn by being internal, integrated into daily work, and focused on organizational talent discovery rather than external branding
• Implementation success requires executive sponsorship, clear communication, simple interface design, and thoughtful integration with existing talent management systems

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