After a three year hiatus, Workday Rising, the annual conference of Workday, happened in person from September 11th-15th in Orlando. Still following some of the COVID related protections, the total number of in person attendees were limited to just 8,000 though the total attendees including remote participation was more like 19,000. I was very happy to hear repeated statement that for the first time, the highest number of in person attendance is from Higher Ed! Way to go!

On Monday, prior to the real conference started, there were two pre-conferences related to Higher Ed. One focused primarily on Workday Student and the other on all products. I was fortunate to share our story with the audience in both of these, which I believe was well received. One was the advising system that we put in place last Fall using Workday Extend, which has grown from where we began. The second was how we have expanded the use of Workday recruitment to include student and faculty recruitment.

There were several interesting presentations that I attended and learned from, but the most I learned from was in networking with both implementation consultants and other institutions. There is something to be said about learning this way that Zoom meetings simply cannot replace.

I was pretty impressed with the way Workday Prism is being used for both HR and student, especially for student retention at Point Loma Nazarene University. We are doing some great things with Prism ourselves and I will write about this soon. Since most of our data, HR, Finance and Student are in one system, tools like Prism provide ways to get at reliable and accurate data in ways that are much harder if the data is fragmented. Of course, not ALL our data is in Workday, so Prism provides ways to bring external data in. In our case, we have successfully brought historical data for student from previous systems (because we chose not to bring all student data to Workday), which allows longitudinal analysis.

Our Advising system built on Workday Extend is something that continues to work well for us to support the way our institution does advising. However, some of the advances I saw from Workday in tools such as Academic Planning is so good and I am sure our students will like the way they are structured. There are still some issues with the way Workday deals with double majors and a major and a minor that they need to sort out before we can start using the natively delivered functionality.

The hotel where we were, the WiFi stopped working in the middle of my demo, but I somehow managed to work through the presentation. Subsequently, the blame was assigned to my Mac (which I don’t take lightly!) It turned out that I had a popup window from ESET (the virus/malware protection software) asking me to reboot my computer, which may have been the cause.

The second presentation was on how we produced a custom consolidated document of all submitted documents for faculty search and provide them in a Google Drive for ease of review. That created a lot of interest and questions to me directly. In addition, I explained how we have configured student recruitment with inclusion in mind by providing opportunities to apply for jobs for work study students for a period of time before they are made available to others.

Of all the things I learned from the presentations, the highlight was the security and privacy features in Workday. You can purge data (irreversible, so be very careful) or scramble or mask data (very useful when you are training). Each of these is very complicated, so clearly understanding them before attempting to do them is highly recommended, but we are going to look into especially the masking in a different tenant when we do demos or testing new features.

It was also great to see Wellesley staff who attended acting as a resource for other higher ed colleagues who are just in the process of implementation.

When you come from such a big conference, you pick up so many different things that you want to implement, but after coming back to work, you realize that it is not that simple because of lack of time and resources etc. But we do have a few that we want to move forward with.