Workday is a cloud-based enterprise applications suite with a variety of uses, including financial management and human capital management (HCM). It competes with similar offerings from a variety of enterprise software firms, including Oracle and SAP. If you’re building and maintaining a tech stack for a business, chances are good you’ll come across Workday offerings at some point—which means Workday training.

Among the key features of Workday are talent management, time tracking, recruiting and employee self-service, tied together by integrated workforce scheduling and a centralized HR database. There’s also real-time reporting and analytics.

Colin Forth, vice president of Workday Education, explains that Workday training is designed to meet the needs of their different audiences, which includes Workday administrators, business owners, and professional services consultants. “We have more 200 courses with some 600 distinct course days,” he says. “We also offer subscription-based Workday Success plans with additional education, tools, and expertise.”

The company offers product level-training in system design, configuration, and system usage, which allows tech professionals (including sysadmins) to optimize Workday products for the needs of their particular business.

Accreditations and Certifications

Workday offers both a customer-facing professional accreditation (based on a set of courses taken and assessments passed) and a professional services certification (likewise based on content taken and tests). “In addition to courses, we provide this training in the version of the application the customer or organization uses to improve relevancy and usefulness,” Forth says.

The training for professional services is organized in certification tracts by functional/product areas. In general, entry-level certifications require essentials courses, applied knowledge courses, and application of those concepts and skills in a hands-on simulation. "Specialized certifications then built upon that set of knowledge to go deeper into more specific areas of product functionality," Forth says.

Workday Pro trains individuals to be professional Workday functional owners and systems administrators, with trainees receiving supplemental training packages with each Workday update.

Workday's training for customers is organized by functional/product areas and role/customer lifecycle. For example, Workday Administrator in a production system (versus someone designing a new configuration). “We offer all of these in a mix of learning modes from video libraries for shorter clear topics, virtual self-paced learning with live system interactions, virtual instructor led training in system, and in-person learning in a classroom setting,” he explains.

Benefits of Flexible Learning

From Forth's perspective, it’s important to offer multiple training formats such as in-person, virtual, or on-demand, as different content can dictate modes of delivery. For example, quick topics are best served in on-demand videos. “We also like to consider travel costs and attention span when we lean into developing virtual instructor lead content,” he adds. “We have moved more to virtual delivery and creating courses in multiple modes of delivery to let the customer choose.”

Forth says the most popular courses are the Human Resources Fundamentals, which provides an overview of the HR functionality and system design principles, as well as the Financial Fundamentals course and the Report Writer class.

“We are also experimenting with more mixed media given delivery has shifted more to virtual,” he explains. “We also notice more and more customers are enjoying self-paced system interaction, so we are developing more of those course options.”

Additional Training Support Offered

The Workday Success plans help businesses identify which features to adopt through 1:1 workshops and regular checkpoints. There’s also the opportunity to interact with peers who have experienced similar challenges in Workday-facilitated small-group sessions, as well as on-demand training and education, from webinars to self-service knowledge libraries.

The plans come in three instances (Enhanced, Guided, and Guided with Elevated Support) and include features such as a semi-annual alignment with a customer success manager, governance and strategic plans, and feature adoption planning reviews.

Workday also offers a series of webinars that can be viewed upon registration—topics range from the modernization of finance analytic architectures to using Workday to achieve sustainable sourcing and supplier management goals.

Training Outside Official Workday Channels

It's important to note that one can only receive a certification from Workday by either being an employee of Workday or a Workday partner company.

However, there are some options for Workday training outside the official path, including a Master's program from the Cloud Foundation, priced at $999, which offers 18 self-paced courses focused on various modules. These include classes on integration, payroll, finance, advanced reporting, recruiting, and talent management, as well as Workday HCM.

ZaranTech also offers a 31-hour online Workday training course, complete with 25 videos, lab documents and assessments. After completing the course learners receive a certificate. Session recordings are available for six months after live training ends.

The first two session videos, Introduction to Workday Concepts and Organization, are offered as free previews to the rest of the course—each are more than 90 minutes long. Likewise, the first two assignments, assessments and lab activities, as well as access to two e-documents, including "How to Start Your Career in Workday," are offered free of charge.