Thoughts on Workday training

I recently had the opportunity to attend the 4 day (30 hour) classroom Workday HCM Fundamentals course. I’ve attended many HR Systems courses through the years and Workday’s was similar. The instructor explained the concept and then there were exercises in the training manual to reinforce the concepts. The last day had a 3 hour exercise in which you started a full HR setup from scratch: so creating the org, company, location, job profile, grade, etc.

Overall, the instructor was very good, the materials were helpful and having one’s own sandbox to do the exercises in was quite helpful. Granted, my company paid for the course, but I felt it was good value for money, as far as training courses go.

The only negative: the instructor had no ‘practical’ experience in the field–she was a top notch trainer, but if you said, ‘my company does xyz, how would I configure the system to accomodate that?’, she had no answer. In other sessions in the past, I’ve heard trainers answer, ‘well, we had a similar-sized company, and they did abc, but you could also do xyz’, that sort of thing. I heard from other colleagues who took the same course in other locations that their trainers were the same, more from a training background than an implementation background.

The other odd one, was the amount of times she had mentioned in class, ‘you don’t need to know how to do this, your consultants will set it up for you, you just need to know that the possibility exists’. Granted, we’ll have a consulting partner during implementation, however, our company tends to expect that long-term support will be done without consultants. Therefore, from a staffing perspective, we must know everything about the product that is possible. Perhaps other companies are different in this regard, although I was chatting with the pair next to me and their company is the same, lots of tasks on the current staff and lean margins so not a lot of consulting support. Back in the day of taking PeopleSoft courses, I don’t remember that same emphasis on having consultants.