Launching the Workday Learning Center, Powered by Extended Enterprise

At Workday, we strive to deliver a great customer experience. And for many of our users, taking product training is their first experience with us. That’s why starting  Dec. 14, customers will be able to access our world-class training content using the Workday Learning Center, powered by Extended Enterprise.

We recently spoke with Jeff McClure, vice president of education at Workday, about the benefits this will bring for our users.

Can you give us an overview of what the Workday Education team does?

The Workday Education team helps our customers and partners learn how to configure, administer, and use the Workday service and applications. We train the people who are responsible for Workday at their organization, along with consultants. 

As a training organization, we conduct over one million transactions per year and nearly 4,100 live, global training sessions. We have approximately 85,000 extended learners in our current system and 54 certification programs available to our ecosystem of partners and customers. 

And in addition to over 13,000 certified resources in the Workday ecosystem, we’ve had more than 2,000 learners complete over 3,000 accreditations through Workday Pro. This is our customer accreditation program that trains individuals to obtain a similar level of expertise as our certified consultants. These learners are among the best and brightest in the ecosystem, and the extensive training they’ve taken through Workday Pro ensures their organizations get the most value out of Workday.

What’s changing with the move to Workday Learning Center, powered by Extended Enterprise?

The Workday Learning Center is how our users will access Extended Enterprise—our new Workday product that builds on the functionality of Workday Learning. Workday Learning caters to workers within an organization, such as employees and contingent workers, and is designed to allow our customers to deliver learning to their own people. Workday Learning for Extended Enterprise however, allows external users—people outside those customer organizations, such as suppliers, partners, and contractors—to access learning content. 

By bringing our customers’ learners into Workday, we’re providing them with a unified view of the entire workforce from a compliance and skills perspective. This also facilitates easy knowledge sharing across the ecosystem, allowing our customers to scale resources quickly as operating conditions change, and engage their learners with the most up-to-date and specialized knowledge.

The Workday Education team is incredibly focused on making sure that people taking training—our students and customers—have a great experience. Based on their feedback, we’ve made a lot of improvements over the years in terms of how we build and deliver our materials, and we innovate rapidly. We see Extended Enterprise as a way for us to continue our focus on our learners and on innovation. 

Much like everything else this year, training and education has been disrupted by COVID-19. How has Workday Education changed?

In March, we moved our training from on-site to completely remote. Amazingly, our team completed this transition in about three weeks. And thankfully, we had already taken steps a couple of years earlier to begin experimenting with remote learning. 

These steps include our new “Learn Remote” offering, which allows for online attendance to our “Learn In-Person” courses, as well as the transition to electronic training manuals. These advancements were critical in helping us support our customers and partners this year.

Why is the Workday Learning Center important for our customers and partners?

The Workday Learning Center gives Workday Education an entirely new platform with a whole new set of tools and capabilities that we didn't have before. It lets us work closely not only with the teams that are focused on Workday Learning, but also with the broader set of Workday applications. 

This allows the Workday product teams, in partnership with Workday Education, to focus on how we can all come together to benefit our customers and partners. With the Workday Learning Center, we can create an even better vision for the future of training—and support our quest to deliver a remarkable digital experience for our customers, partners, and Workday employees alike.

Our partnerships have influenced how we strategically evolve our services, such as our Workday Pro program, the Executive Briefing Series, and tenant and eBook experiences. And, we’re extremely grateful to our customers and partners for helping to shape our offerings with their valuable feedback.

We’re at the beginning of this initiative, so what comes next?

Workday Education has been focused on creating an exceptional experience for our students and instructors for many years. Now we’re extending that momentum with a great Workday Learning Center experience. 

We’re also focusing on our operational excellence. We’re looking at ways we can use information about our learners—what they’ve already learned, how they’re doing, and so on—to provide an even-better learning experience. In the future, for example, we’ll be able to identify learner trends and start to predict which customers may need additional support from us. There’s also a lot of opportunity to use data to improve the customer experience.

Finally, we want to be a model learning organization. We see an opportunity to lead the way, and we have a lot of innovators within Workday Education to help get us there. Our forward-thinking teams at Workday will help us continue to stretch and challenge our own organization to innovate.

What are you looking forward to the most in the future?

Even though we’re all currently facing challenges, I’m excited that we’re figuring out how to navigate them together with our customers. I’m encouraged because Workday has so many customers whose mission and values align to ours in terms of serving and helping each other to be better.

I’m looking forward to helping our customers quickly make the most out of Workday and get to a vision of how they want to use Workday to run a better business, create a better environment for their talent, and execute as effectively as possible. And when our customers are successful, that means their customers—and the people they serve—stand a better chance of being successful. We have a real opportunity to create a brighter future.

Visit our Workday education and training page to learn more about these opportunities for your teams.