Teams profile cards get Awards and Certifications, worth checking your data first

This one’s straightforward: if your organisation already populates Awards and Certifications in Microsoft 365 profiles, that same information is about to become visible on Teams profile cards too, not just Outlook and the Copilot app, where it’s already been showing since April.

Targeted release begins worldwide in early October 2026, completing the same month. General availability follows immediately after, completing by mid-October. It applies to Teams profile cards on desktop and Mac.

A new Awards and Certifications section appears on the Overview and Contact tabs of a Teams profile card, sitting below the Skills section. Each badge shows its title and issuer by default; selecting one reveals more detail, including a description and award date.

Worth knowing beyond what’s in Microsoft’s roadmap message: badges issued within the last 30 days can appear as an automatic, time-limited highlight to draw attention to recent achievements, and Microsoft Copilot may also reference badge information when answering people-related questions or summarising a profile, not just when someone’s actively looking at the card itself.

The whole experience is read-only in Teams, Outlook and the Copilot app; badges are managed entirely at their source system, and changes made there can take up to 24 hours to sync through to Microsoft 365.

There’s no governance angle here, this is display-only and touches nothing your organisation hasn’t already decided to populate. The one practical thing worth doing is a data check:

• This has already been visible in Outlook and Copilot since April 2026. If your organisation’s Awards and Certifications data was incomplete, inconsistent, or outdated back then, that’s already been visible for months, Teams surfacing the same data is a second reminder to fix it, not the first.
• Coverage will look patchy if only some people have data populated. Because the section simply doesn’t appear when fields are empty, a mix of populated and empty profiles across your organisation will read as inconsistent once this becomes visible somewhere as prominent as Teams.
• Badge accuracy isn’t something IT can fix directly. Since badges are managed at the source system rather than in Microsoft 365, any correction needs to happen there, worth knowing before a user raises it as a Teams problem when it’s actually a source-system one.

• All users in organisations that populate Awards and Certifications properties in Microsoft 365 profiles
• Anyone who’s noticed inconsistent or outdated badge data in Outlook or the Copilot app since April, worth fixing before it reaches Teams too
• Helpdesk teams likely to field “how do I fix my badge” questions that actually need routing to the source system, not Microsoft 365

If your organisation already uses these fields properly, no action is required. If not, or if you’re not sure:

1. Review whether Awards and Certifications data is actually populated and accurate, particularly if it’s been live in Outlook and Copilot since April without much attention.
2. Check for coverage gaps across your organisation, since inconsistent population will look more noticeable once it’s visible in Teams profile cards too.
3. Know where corrections actually happen, badges are managed at the source system, not in Microsoft 365, so brief helpdesk to route badge-accuracy questions there rather than treating them as a Teams issue.

This update is based on Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 568078 (Message ID MC1462467), published 26 August 2026. Rollout dates are provided by Microsoft and may change.