Workday certification

From the mailbox, an interesting question:

Are you Workday Certified? I've read some several online posts about becoming Workday Certified and these seem to be more on the implementation partners of Workday and not the clients directly but I was curious to know if you had any experiences in that area. 

I've been following the Workday certification topic for years.  It's been a hot topic on Workday's Community discussion board, with 100+ 'up votes' from customers supporting the idea of expanding certification options.  As well it's come up repeatedly at customer forums and Workday Rising (Workday's customer conference).

Background:

 

• Historically, Workday has kept certification severely locked down; you could only become certified as a Workday internal employee or a Workday partner.
• I find it creates an interesting proposition as many of the partners take young, bright people right out of university, train them on Workday and put them through the certification process.  However, these bring minds while well educated have no practical HR or IT experience and are just starting out their careers as junior consultants.  While you may have some more seasoned certified consultants, you may also get these fresh minds, as non-partners are effectively excluded from certifying.
• If you are certified and leave your employer, the certification will expire if you are not able to renew it as per the rules (go back to step 1 and see who can be certified.)

 

So what's new?

 

Workday is bringing out customer certifications!  It's being branded under the name 'Workday Pro,' and is specifically targeted (or limited, depending on your view) to the employees of Workday customers.  Read:  contractor or contingent workers at customers may not attend, nor can 'ordinary' independent consultants.

Workday's materials specifically call out that it's "targeted at customers who want to actively engage and work side by side with the Ecosystem on a path to develop a similar level of knowledge and expertise."  I think this is a great step for customers as there are many savvy HR systems, HRIS, HRIT (or whatever other branding that your company uses) who would like to be fully engaged on an implementation rather than suffering the after effects upon go-live.

Workday is quick to call out that it's won't grant 'implementer' access, the holy grail of implementations, in particular due to the more efficient i-load functionality which beats the 'regular' Workday EIB data loading functionality, hands down.  

The nitty gritty details 

 

Workday has developed a certification roadmap, but is taking a phased approach with releasing the various options.  First up is reporting.

The certification process seems to be modeled upon the partner certification process:  you take the courses (in person or online), then the written multiple choice test, then agree to take the bi-annual release update training.

Side note:  I once asked our WD certified partner if she had any plans for the weekend.  She gave me a brief look at her screen, it was a series of items that she had to cover for her update training.  As it couldn't impact her billable hours on our project she was doing it on the weekend.

More thoughts

 

As this is a new item, WD covers various scenarios--what happens if you move companies, what happens if you don't take the update training, when does it expire, etc.  In particular I was curious as to how this would apply to me; I've taken the 3 courses listed under the reporting track (check back here for where I discussed the Report Writer class).  IF you've already taken a course, you do not need to take it again.  The only additional cost is the 1 credit fee for the written test/biannual updates.

My take

 

Disclaimer:  I was previously a PeopleSoft certified consultant.  I think this is a step in the right direction, the more we can empower customers to take ownership of software and processes, the better.

However...if I was my boss (who is absolutely super, the best boss in the world!), I'd question the value.  As long as you know that your employee is reasonably competent and good at their job, do you really need certification?  If anything, it just gives the employee more leverage to ask for a raise or search for another job.  Or is this a motivator for employees, to be able to become certified?  Maybe it is, if you haven't yet taken the classes.

Interesting blog: Workday training

Spotted an interesting blog last week by Matthew Heminger.  I had taken some of his courses back when he was an instructor at PeopleSoft and I was a PeopleSoft consultant, he's a top notch instructor.  As Matthew approaches things from his many years as a trainer, it's definitely worth a read as I think he highlights some key points.

In some ways I feel that the rapid speed of SaaS implementation (not Workday in particular, but any SaaS) makes this topic timely; as you're moving at such a rapid clip there's even less time for knowledge transfer and training as implementation schedules are so condensed.

On a related note, one of the conversation threads I've been following for years on the Workday community site is about training strategies and longer term how to keep training materials up to date as Workday continues to evolve:  processes, pages and fields change, how to keep up?  It seems to be a topic that is interesting to many people...

Having started the HR training (version 16 or 17), taking a glance through the current 24 and future v 25 functionality, it's a struggle to stay up to date.

Further, from a European perspective, the issue is compounded by being multilingual, as I'm sure is the case in other regions of the world as well for many companies.  Our training documentation (HR+manager+employee) needs to be in a number of languages. 

As an unrelated sidenote, it's interesting how many youtube videos have cropped up showing Workday and offering training since the last time I gave that a google.  It's great to see so much knowledge and talent sharing out on the internet!

Workday Training Schedules...still 'unglobal'

Way back in November 2012, I was whining about Worday's US-centric training schedule.  Here we are 18 months later, and I'm about to do it again...

I am very lucky that my company will pay for me to attend training.  While I've done most of the basic training early on in the project, our US colleagues are struggling post go-live with reporting topics.  I took the basic reporting class last year, but wanted to get my hands into the 'Calculated Fields' class, a 1.5 credit (15 hour option).

On the plus side, it's a virtual class offered over 3 days at 5 hours a day.

On the minus side, the timing is pretty poor.  For a company that claims to support global companies, I find it lacking.

• There are 8 instances of this course scheduled between now and the end of July.
• None are in the Eastern US timezone (which is somewhat palatable to London), but 7 are in Pacific or Central US.
• One is in the 'London timezone' (from 11 AM - 4 PM) according to their website.  I cannot quite figure out why the Pacific and Central classes start at 9 AM, but Workday thinks that in London our workday begins at 11 AM??  For anyone on the continent, that's a noon-5 PM run.
• That being said, the class does fall inside the European workday, a novelty from my friends in Pleasanton.
• Most of the US classes are Wed-Fri, so even if you did want to bite the bullet and take the US-centric offering, you're stuck online until 11 PM Friday night if you choose the Pacific option.  As well, starting a course at 6 PM on a Friday after a long work week will not be effective for me.

I wish I could have a better report out in this area.  I can only assume that Workday's customer base/focus remains heavily in the US market?

Is Workday more complex that it appears? Or is the software not strong enough?

I've had a quiet week as my US HR colleagues are currently on an emergency trip to the HR Shared Service Center to try and sort out some Workday operational issues.  As you may recall, we had a soft launch in the US in December.  Now that everyone is back from their holidays and the first monthly payroll of January has run, it appears that post-implementation issues are larger than expected.  So a swat team of HR project members are planted in the SSC office to try and train them again and work through some issues.  A few key points:

1. It appears that some end-to-end processes really are not end to end.  So the processes work in the system, you can hire someone, transfer them, but at the end of the day, all of the dots are not connected on the process side, so they have orphaned tasks or recognizing that the WD process is a certain system data entry piece piece of a bigger functional process, such as a hire which requires non-system activity such as background checking.

2. Robustness of manager processes or lack of manager training?  My boss has been trying promote an employee using the manager self-service and it's required multiple HR people to help him to do this task.  Noticing online, there's not a lot of opportunity to provide dynamic help text, especially along the way.  You can enter help text into a transaction, but it's not smart enough to recognize what is wrong necessarily, which is the issue.  As well, the system is a little bit loosey goosey.  It's not as locked down as it should be for less knowledgeable or astute managers.

3. Change management/staffing.  In the sales cycle, it is insinuated that you can run the software with only trained monkeys, it's that easy.  Our SSC (who are bright data entry people, btw) are new to Workday as well as to the company.  The software is not so intrinsically easy that they can just pick it up and use it.  Further, similar to the above loosey goosey comment, it lets them do things online that they should not.  Not that WD is not an easy software, just that it's not so easy like looking at a web page, it's a software application like any other, so it requires training.  Further, with WD's updates, the pages change up to three times a year which does not help the people who are just learning it.

So I remain undecided whether the issue is:

• Workday isn't as easy as it is suggested to be.
• HR's training efforts were not good enough.
• The software is too flexible and open, so you actually need highly talented people to utilize it.
• Our implementation of the software is the issue, not the software itself.

Workday job aids - learning and using Workday

In the Workday sales cycle, one of the things they often emphasize is how easy it is for the users:  HR, managers, etc.  Once you're in the implementation phase, however, you realize that you need some type of help documentation--the system is not standalone and usable without some background/training.  Workday does not mention on their 'main' webpage, but there is plenty of discussion about this topic on the Workday community--they're called 'job aids'.

Job aids are 1-2 page instructional documentation, to help a user to perform a task.  They are meant to provide just in time information to a user or manager who needs to perform a task.  According to examples presented on the Workday Community site, companies are handling these in various ways:  Word docs, pdfs, instruction on internal company portals, etc.

Examples of job aids would be:

• Logging into Workday
• Changing your Workday password
• Create a position
• Create a requisition
• Separate an employee
• Delegate a task
• Hire an applicant

The interesting thing for me to see is how companies are approaching this topic.  Because WD changes three times a year, many people are trying to minimize the screenshots and just include the menu path.

For example, here is a piece of a sample from Community:

Notice this company is not using screenshots and minimizing the actual pictures/icons used.  Doing so makes upgrades easier, otherwise you'd be re-doing these docs three times per year potentially!

As a global organisation, our company is particularly interested in this topic of user training on Workday.  In particular, because we have very limited manager self-service capabilities in the current system.  We provide view only access currently.  In the post-Workday world, managers will be able to initiate transactions, such as pay increases, terminations, etc.

Where to find more info on this topic

IF you're a Workday customer, the Workday Community provides many job aids.  Search for 'job aid' in the search box and then select 'Shared solution' on the left under 'Filter by'.  There are at least 30 samples out there, probably 50+ if you search well.

IF you're not a Workday customer--there are still options and Google is your friend.  :)

Many customers post their materials and for whatever reason they are open to the world.  Type 'Workday job aids' into Google and you'll see what I mean.  Here are some examples of what I've found recently:

Cornell University transfer process
Activis goal setting
Tyco's hire documentation

Hope this has been helpful.  It seems that many companies are handling this training topic differently, so always great to hear what others are doing, so that we can all learn more and produce a better user experience.

Feel free to add any insight into the comments.  :)

How to learn Workday

It seems from the stats that a few people come here wanting to find out:  How can I learn Workday?  A few thoughts...

1. Join a consulting company - Here in the London area, Workday is a very hot skill.  Even if you do not have actual Workday experience, as long as you have some other ERP or SaaS experience, companies are willing to hire you on (especially consulting companies), on the premise that it's easy to train you on this new software, as long as you have some HRIS experience.

2. Take an entry level position in HRIS - As well, companies that have already implemented the software are looking for people to maintain it, in HRIS analyst roles.  If I was an entry level or junior person, I'd take one of those positions to build up some experience.

3. Take the training/get a look at the training manuals/get access to a test tenant/get access to the Workday Community - It can be difficult to get started in this area as you cannot get access to a test tenant or to the WD Community unless you are an implementation partner or a customer.  However, once you are, the Workday training provides a good foundation to get started.  As well if you are a self-starter, there is a lot of learn from the documentation, if you can get access to it.

4. Join LinkedIn groups - There are a variety of LinkedIn groups that discuss Workday functionality.  Join them all.  :)

5. Apply for positions at Workday itself - Having worked for PeopleSoft, I understand the Workday work environment is similarly quite good--sharp and dedicated people, a fun place to be.  I've heard what they might lack in compensation they make up for in intellectual stimulation and a pleasant work life balance.  Try here to apply.

6. Read blogs - There's not a lot out there (yet), but some good info is starting to emerge, if you search for it on Google, etc.

Other ideas?

My review of the Workday Report Writer training

I recently attended virtual training on reporting from Workday. While you get a high level overview of reporting in the HCM Fundamentals class and run one report, Report Writer is the first reporting class that you can take to learn how to create your own reports.  It's a virtual class, 10 hours spread over two days. 

At first glance, the WD reporting product is not the easiest to learn on your own with no instruction (believe me, I tried!), especially if you're used to a relational database model.  In WD you can access the reporting tool from within a page, so you can click the 'related actions' from a hyperlinked field and choose to 'create report from here' or to view related reports.  However, if you don't have the report basics, you will soon be lost.

I'm happy to say that the two day WD training cleared that right up for me.  The class starts with some background about the WD database structure and some high level details about how the reporting works.  Then, you start to run delivered reports, then you build basic reports (on one object such as the Worker object), and finally advanced reports where you combine objects and then some simple matrix ones where you run counts, similar to an Excel pivot table.

This class was probably helpful to me at this point, because I now understand the structure of Workday, and how there are various objects such as the Worker, Location, Company, etc. and how the data is clustered around these objects.  There were some people in the class who have never seen WD beyond attending the HCM Fundamentals class (a required pre-requisite for this course) and they were lost before the end of the first day.  If you are at least in the implementation stage and have some idea of how to navigate around the WD system on your own and hire someone, for example, you'll be fine.

WD offers Report Writer as an introduction to reporting, then you can follow it up with Advanced Reporting and Analytics (15 hours over 3 days) and/or Calculated fields (15 hours/3 days).  These are all virtual options, with Report Writer being the pre-req to the other two.  There is also the option to do the reporting suite in a classroom setting by taking Workday Reporting:  Basic to Analytics.

That being said, assuming that you have a test tenant to use and can get a hold of the manual, you could probably walk yourself through the training quite easily. 

Some of the things that confused me at face value, before taking the course:

1. The overwhelming plethoria of fields with the same name.  Every instance of a field is its own reporting field.  This differs greatly from a relational database, where if you have something like 'jobcode description', you'll have one jobcode table with a description and you tie your code on your secondary table back to your foundation table. 

If you type 'Name' into Workday to find the field 'Name', you'll quickly get confused as you'll get all sorts of Names (descriptions) for things.

2. The icons used in the reporting tool.  The icons are meant to give you short-cut details about a field without having to look into the details, but until you know what they mean, it's a bit confusing.  Sure 'T' stands for text and '#' is a number field, but what's the thing that looks like a spoon?  Or the fireworks?  Once you know that the spoon is the base table and the fireworks represents a one-to-many relationship, it becomes a little more clear.

Once you get a handle on those basics, it becomes easier to navigate through the tool.

The one odd thing to me--and granted I come from a mix of HRIS systems from basic homegrown MS access applications to more sophisticated tools like PeopleSoft--is that WD locks down reporting from the join perspective.  So if you're doing a 'basic' report, then you're only working on one object--say 'Worker'.  If you change your mind and need other data that is not on Worker, you need to convert to an advanced report (which is possible).  However, if you start your report on an object and discover that it does not have all of your fields, if a join does not exist, you cannot 'force' a join the way you can in other databases.  You basically have to begin again, this time using the 'right' datasource.  I can imagine that one causing some frustration at the user level.

To view my other posts on training, click here.

Thoughts on Workday training – a few months later & Configurable Security Fundamentals

It’s been a few months since I’ve had time to write here, but time to change that.  :-)

I had put some thoughts together back when I was first taking the Workday training courses, here and here. I’ve since taken a few more courses and am now sending my staff to the HCM Fundamentals course that I took, so a good time for a look back. I’ll start with the courses I’ve taken in the meantime…

The Configurable Security Fundamentals class
This is an ‘online only’ course, like a few of Workday’s offerings which are not offered in a classroom setting. As always, you can find more details about Workday courses here. It’s 10 hours spread over two days, so five hours each day. It explains everything about setting up Workday user security: configuration, security groups, domains, business process security, etc. The agenda was full and the class kept moving.

Sidenote: the format/structure for online courses appears to be the same. You receive a pdf manual a day or two before the course, along with log-in details to *your* tenant, as well as technical details of logging in so that you can test your computer in advance. On course day, you can log in via the pc for both the online course plus voice, or you can log in to view the presentation and dial in separately to the call via phone. I’d say 90-95% of the people used the pc for audio. Overall, there were around 20 or 22 people attending normally.

The structure of the online courses is similar to the classroom training, the instructor walks through a powerpoint, explains the concepts and then you get to work through the exercises in the manual in your tenant.

The good

• no travel costs
• even though it’s online, it’s still a full schedule, similar to what you’d get in a classroom environment. The pricing structure reflects this as well: it’s the same 600 USD per unit, whether it is in-person or online. Sidenote: I noticed that when I took the course in October 2012, it was 8 hours total, they’ve since increased it to 10 hours, so perhaps others found it to be too quick.
• the instructor will stay on an extra 30 min beyond the end of the class on day 1, in case you have questions. As well, this is offered for 30 min before/30 min after on day 2.
• the instructor can log into *your* tenant, so if you have messed up an exercise, they can try and sort you out while people are working on the next one or on a break.

The bad

• there is 30 min at the beginning of day 1 of ‘meet and greet’, similar to if you were in a classroom session. With 20 people saying what their role is, it began to drag a big.
• the instructor has pre-set expectations of how quickly the class should move. Not having the face to face contact perhaps can be an impediment to ‘reading’ if people really understand things.
• In this course, the instructor in addition walked through the exercise before you were unleashed to do the exercise. As an occasional instructor myself, I found that a little odd, to be shown the concepts, an example and then the actual exercise itself, she did it. We then replicated the exact same exercise. So in the back of my head, I wonder if it’s too difficult, the exercises ‘as is’ to be in an online course, as the HCM course I took did not follow this heavy hand-holding.
• scheduling - this one deserves more of a read-out…

I know I start to sound like a broken record here, but Workday’s scheduling is not indicative of a global player. Considering it’s an online course, I would expect a little more flexibility in the offer times, but once again, it’s 9 AM California time or 9 AM New York time, and on a Thurs/Fri rather than other days. For those of us in places around the world, that begins to get old very fast. My security class had a 5 PM start in the UK, so I worked a full day and then got online for another few hours of intense training.

Taking a short look today (Apr 25, 2013), Workday is offering three security sessions in the coming weeks, two in May and one in June. All three of them are on Pacific time, 9 AM-2 PM, although at least on a Mon/Tues or Tues/Wed. Looking at my handy timezone calculator, that looks like the following around the world:

Location	Date	Start	Date	Finish
San Francisco	Thurs Apr 25	9:00 AM	Thurs Apr 25	2:00 PM
London	Thurs Apr 25	5:00 PM	Thurs Apr 25	10:00 PM
Paris	Thurs Apr 25	6:00 PM	Thurs Apr 25	11:00 PM
Singapore	Fri Apr 26	midnight	Fri Apr 26	5:00 AM
Tokyo	Fri Apr 26	1:00 AM	Fri Apr 26	6:00 AM

If you are a US-based company, with only US customers, then that is perfectly fine. But considering that Workday keeps claiming that they are global in nature, I find this to be appalling, in particular when you consider that these are online classes, so they could occasionally put one in a European or Asian timezone, even though that might mean that the instructor is doing odd hours for the two days. For whatever reason, Workday insists on putting everything into the California timezone. OK, timezone rant now over…

Overall though, I’d say the security class was quite good. I’m not sure if you’d need to send your entire team there, or rather, send one person who will bring back the manual. If you have that plus access to a test tenant, you can start to play around with security to understand how it works, while reviewing the manual. In addition, I’d recommend that you check out the Workday Community, a lot of people post questions/issues related to security, and often through reading those, you can get some ideas of pitfalls and how certain setups may make your security maintenance more difficult.

Workday training schedules

As we’re a global company, there are people being trained around the globe…or attempting to be trained anyway. Workday is still a young company, although they claim to offer an HCM product that meets the needs of global companies. However, they have no trainers in Asia and only one for Europe. No really, just one. So what happens when that one is pre-booked for a customer course, etc.? They fly another one over from the US. My Asia colleague requires a few Workday courses, so he’s travelling to Pleasanton, California, along with other US cities, to be able to take them one after another.

That being said, Workday does offer online courses, to avoid the travel. However, they offer them during US timezones, so either Eastern or Pacific time. I’m not especially looking forward to taking an online course that starts at 5 PM Friday my time, however, that is the only option, so therefore it will be done.

Longer term, WD needs to step up the game a little in this regard, or stop claiming to be a global player.

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.