Inside ServiceNow University’s Big Idea: Reskilling Through Play, Not Pressure

ServiceNow has evolved into a mission-critical platform that’s now deeply integrated into the daily operations of most enterprises. In 2023, the company claimed that 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies were customers. Now, as adoption accelerates, there’s a growing need for skilled experts who can design, implement, and maintain ServiceNow environments. It’s essentially why the company launched its workforce training initiative this month.

“ServiceNow University is the ‘unify-zation’ of all our [learning and development] for all of our audiences—our customers, partners, employees, and what we call learners in the wild,” Jayney Howson, ServiceNow’s senior vice president and head of global learning and development, told me. We spoke earlier this month on the sidelines of the company’s Knowledge conference in Las Vegas, where she shared why it’s a better education platform than what’s out in the market today.

Disclosure: I attended ServiceNow's Knowledge conference as a guest of the company, which paid for my flights and hotel. However, no one at ServiceNow dictated what I should write for this post. These words are my own.

“What’s really clear is that current learning solutions just aren’t working. We need to evolve the way that people learn,” she declared, citing a Boston Consulting Group report that most workers will have to reskill within the next five years. Moreover, workforces have become paralyzed with fear amid concerns about job losses and failure due to the current economic state or the rise of artificial intelligence.

Although she didn’t name specific platforms, she was likely referencing competitive offerings from Salesforce, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Google, AWS, IBM, and Coursera.

ServiceNow thinks the solution to this paralysis is the creation of a new worker state “in which they feel like they can learn those new skills, and the best antidote to fear is play.” The company is positioning ServiceNow University as being akin to a playground, “a magic circle” where it’s “okay to fail, to make mistakes, [and] learn those new skills.”

ServiceNow’s Learning Evolution

This isn’t the company’s first program around learning and development. Before launching SNU, there was Now Learning and then the RiseUp Initiative. The former was first unveiled in 2016 and has undergone multiple updates. It was the official learning and recognition platform provided by ServiceNow.

The latter debuted in 2024 as a community effort to expand technological access to underrepresented and underserved communities. It had a goal of training one million people, but reportedly encountered some trouble and underwent restructuring. Nevertheless, Howson called the RiseUp Initiative a success: “What we found is that we weren’t going big enough…But, we need to go even bigger and open that top of the funnel.”

Today, ServiceNow has moved the goal post, setting its sights on training three million people by 2027. To achieve this, the company has reimagined what Learning and Development is and consolidated all its programs into SNU.

“ServiceNow University encompasses all skillings that we do. It powers the RiseUp piece. It also does all of our internal programming things, sales enablement, manager enablement, all of that sort of stuff…and then all of our external partner programs, curriculum, etc.,” Howson explained. “We needed to double down on making sure there were enough skilled people in the ecosystem. That is the currency in which I trade. So, our platform’s growing at incredible speed, and in order for the power of that platform to be brought to life, we need people with the right skills to implement that. We made a decision back in March on the best way to do that was to bring all the resources, the talent, and the budget together and re-emerge as ServiceNow University.”

The Race to 3 Million Learners

ServiceNow is banking on SNU to strengthen its ecosystem, with Howson noting that the company will need three million platform experts across a range of technical skill levels to help bring its products to life. “We want to make the world of work work,” she stated. “And for that to happen, we need to get our platform into as many companies as possible. This is more than a digital transformation. It’s a human transformation, and we need to help companies do that. ServiceNow University is the enabler for that human transformation.”

As expected, SNU focuses on educating learners about ServiceNow’s products. However, Howson said the team is exploring broader training topics, like driving business and human transformation within organizations. She added that SNU is working to make its curriculum more accessible beyond IT, tailoring content for teams like HR and CRM. Interestingly, IT professionals are embracing this shift, recognizing the value of the business skills they’re learning.

Howson added that SNU builds on the goal of the RiseUp Initiative: Giving people an opportunity that they may never have had before in tech. “Because what is true is that there is an ecosystem that doesn’t have enough people. There are a ton of people who aren’t earning the money they need to live. And wouldn’t it be amazing if you could put those two things together?”

So what sets ServiceNow University apart in an increasingly crowded learning landscape? And how does the company plan to reach its ambitious goal of training three million people in the coming years?

There are more than 1,000 courses available today, most of which are intermediate or advanced-level classes. They are all developed by professional curriculum designers, though ServiceNow suggests a more crowd-created option could become available if SNU adds more foundational training to its platform. Until then, the current library can lean more towards the technical side to help learners become certified ServiceNow experts.

Howson admitted that she would love for custom courses to be available on SNU, allowing organizations to create a syllabus of learning tailored for knowledge workers. “As much as possible, we want to put the power in the hands of the learner, learning manager, or whoever is driving that side of the conversation,” she said.

To captivate learners’ attention, ServiceNow has invested time in making its courses more playful, engaging, and sticky, while also implementing more testing to ensure knowledge is retained and infusing it all with “instant bits of reward.” It’s not unlike what you might experience with competing platforms.

Embracing AI

In addition, the company is heavily relying on AI to support its campaigns. Perhaps one of the more recognizable and standard elements programs like SNU offer is a personalized playlist, powered by an algorithm that displays relevant courses unique to each learner. Howson boasted that SNU’s recommendation engine is “a step further than the majority out there,” claiming that it’s tracking 12 million skills. “It makes us much more specific in terms of making sure that we have the right courses. I can also see that someone with your profile looks very similar to this profile, and we do all kinds of recommendations, but on a deeper meta level than is standard, because we’re investing in that part. We think AI recommendation and autonomous flow, and then driving that is the biggest part of what we do.”

SNU also offers learners access to an AI-powered coach, an agent that functions like a virtual teacher to assist with lessons, testing, or guidance on the next learning path to take.

Howson noted that AI is helping SNU strike the right balance, ensuring that the platform isn’t too gimmicky while ensuring it effectively builds the skills learners truly need.

That said, she believed that the most significant benefit AI will provide to this program is “driving human connection where you can learn from each other.” Drawing on her experience with Peloton, where users can see when friends are taking a class, join in, and send virtual high-fives, Howson expressed hope that AI will help SNU learners connect through shared experiences and common interests.

“I think AI should be used to drive human connection in learning,” she emphasized.

Ironically, while ServiceNow is using AI to facilitate reskill learning, the commercialization and growth of the technology is a significant reason why SNU was born. Because of AI’s impact on jobs, Howson replied that ServiceNow is taking its L&D efforts seriously, calling it a “big product” and a “hyper focus.”

“We kind of needed to take it seriously, so I guess AI made us take it very seriously,” she quipped.

Community Evangelism

Expect ServiceNow to leverage fans and followers to evangelize SNU, following a similar playbook deployed by Salesforce with its Trailblazers and Agentblazers communities. When asked about it, Howson insisted the platform had “very good organic growth” without resorting to “that tribal kind of mentality.”

Nevertheless, she acknowledges that SNU has some elements of tribalism, such as ranking and badges. “This is the first time we’ve had it consolidated across community and learning,” Howson remarked. “So, you earn points and badges for being an MVP in the community, as well as…learning…No one else does it. Trailhead doesn’t do that. They don’t link those two things together.”

But should ServiceNow amass an army of SNU fans, what would they be called? Salesforce dubbed its Trailhead community Trailblazers. Using ChatGPT, some potential names that might apply include NowPioneers, NowChampions, NowNavigators, or simply Champions. Alternatively, they could be called Pacesetters, a term the company currently uses in its Enterprise AI Maturity Index. Howson didn’t comment on this, but it’s likely that if SNU does achieve its goal of three million learners, a new name may emerge soon after that.

What a ServiceNow Certified Professional Means

“The growth that we’ve seen in our ecosystem over the last three years has been phenomenal and much greater than our competitors, because they saw that growth years ago,” Howson said. She highlighted that there is so much work needed in the ServiceNow space that there aren’t enough experts to address it all. SNU is designed to fix this problem, training the next in-demand professional who will be “incredibly well paid.”

“There is a supply and demand issue within ServiceNow, right now,” she pointed out. “If you want to know that there’s going to be work for you, and you’re going to be in an ecosystem that’s going somewhere, this platform isn’t going away…Companies need us. We are the orchestration layer for that. So the work is continuous and demand is increasing, so it’s worth betting your career on this.”

Featured Image: ServiceNow University booth at the company's Knowledge 2025 conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo credit: Ken Yeung