🌞🏗 2025R1's head-turning talent management features

[1]

Feature: AI Summarization of Content Feedback

Product: Learning

Setup Effort: Automatically Available

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: Workday’s jumping in the AI summaries ring with a generative AI feature that sums up learner feedback on your learning courses. The summary categorizes feedback into Positive, Negative, Technical Issues, and Suggestions, spotlighting key comments. This helps you assess if your content resonates with your learners, enabling targeted improvements. For those of you with required courses and high-volume enrollees, this generated summary is a quicker alternative to perusing course feedback comments individually. Oh, and—it’s fully reportable 😊 

Setup:  

1. Navigate to the Admin View of your course of interest.

2. Click the new tab titled AI Summarized Feedback (it may be under “More”).

3. Click Generate Summary. You also need edit access to the selected course to see and interact with this button.

4. Let Workday do it’s thing! After the summary is generated, you can manually edit the result, regenerate, save the summary, or cancel.

5. The saved summary appears as text with a generation date stamp on the AI Summarized Feedback tab.

Notes:

A feedback summary is not yet available for external learner content uploaded to Workday.

To generate a summary, the learning course must have at least five feedback comments, each with a minimum of 20 characters.

The model can interpret comments in multiple languages, but the generated summary is currently available only in English.

🔗 Release Note

[2]

Feature: Engagement Builder

Product: Learning

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: Workday unveils its new Engagement Builder for Learning Campaigns, a HUGE improvement from its previous version known as Next-Gen Learning Campaigns. Within the Engagement Builder suite, there are 3 consolidated components: Audience Builder, Engagements, and Message Builder.

Audience Builder replaces the Create Audience task, eliminating the need for custom reports with filter conditions 🎉 You can define audiences using conditions, segments, and exceptions (include/exclude workers), preview the audience in real time, and export to Worksheets for collaboration.

The Engagement Builder houses all Learning Campaigns (now called “Engagements”). Here, you can create, edit, run, or suspend engagements.

Building an Engagement starts with defining an audience, an integration system user, and start/end dates. Within the engagement, use the Add Item button to structure your Engagement Timeline with Required Learning (courses with due dates) and custom Messages.

Message Builder, introduced in 2024R2, is now fully integrated into the Engagement Builder suite. It combines channel selection, content creation, and email branding (via Notification Designer) into one experience. Like the Audience Builder, you can preview the messages before sending. While this message builder focuses on email and Workday notifications for now, compatibility with SMS and WhatsApp are coming in a future release.

Setup: Check out the PDF on the release note for complete setup instructions (there’s a LOT there). And, keep your eye out for a future newsletter dedicated to this awesome topic 😉 

🔗 Release Note

[3]

Feature: Enhanced Candidate Tracking for Recruiting Agency User

Product: Talent Acquisition

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: Workday adds new report fields for Offer / Employment Agreements to its Job Application business object AND adds existing candidate tracking fields to the Recruiting Agency User security domains. The newly accessible data includes:

• Job Application Status and Step details

• Interview scheduling info

• Offer / Employment Agreement Docs

This update is all about putting the right info in the right hands at the right moment ⚡️ As a result, your recruiting agents and recruiters can expect more timely and meaningful communication (less back and forth), stronger insights, and improved clarity around resulting agency fees—they can now easily see when their candidates are successfully hired. Greater ease for those managing your candidate pipeline usually translates to an improved experience for your candidates too 🙌

Setup:

1. Create an advanced custom report on the Job Applications datasource.

2. Pull in fields like Stages and Job Application Step. You can also pull in the related business object Interview Sessions to access interview specific fields.

3. On the filter tab, add the field Recruiting Agency and filter for the recruiting agency of interest.

4. Share the custom report with the relevant Recruiting Agency Admins or Users!

Note: To utilize this feature, Recruiting Agencies and Recruiting Agency Users must be setup and in use within your Workday tenant.

🔗 Release Note

[4]

Feature: Mass Populate Worker Profiles with Skills

Product: Career and Development

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: On the fence about deploying Skills? Well, Workday just made Skills adoption way easier with this Mass Populate Worker Profiles with Skills feature. This new task allows your organization to proactively add skills to worker profiles—without waiting for individual workers to do it themselves. You can choose to mass populate Skills from the explicit and/or suggested skills listed on workers’ primary job profile.

The best part? You can send workers a custom message upon execution of the task to let them know Skills were added to their profile 😎

Setup:

1. Enable Skills Cloud (it’s free, but requires some paperwork with Workday!).

2. Under the task Maintain Skills and Experience Setup select the checkbox Populate Suggested Skills for Job Profiles.

3. Enable and configure the domains Set Up: Skills and Experience and Set Up: Mass Populate Worker Profile Skills.

4. Use the Maintain Skills and Experience Setup task to configure the notification workers will receive when skills are added to their profile. The input is at the bottom of the task, labeled Custom Notification Message for Mass Populate Worker Profile Skills.

Notes:

This feature was supposed to include an option to populate skills from suggested skills on the worker profile. However, prior to the Preview Testing Window, Workday removed this option, due to issues. They hope to reintroduce it in a future release. Be warned that the video on the Release Note still includes it!

🔗 Release Note

[5]

Feature: New Workday Onboarding Experience

Product: Candidate Engagement, Talent Acquisition, Onboarding

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: Workday’s new Onboarding Planner hub eliminates the need for Onboarding configuration workarounds, enabling you to deliver a personalized experience the moment a candidate accepts an offer 📩

You can now create multiple Onboarding Plans for specific audiences that automatically assign based on Job Application and/or Worker details specified in condition rules. For example, you can create distinct Onboarding Plans for your engineering vs. sales teams.

The Onboarding Plans are comprised of stages (up to 10) that incorporate notifications and multiple pieces of branded content, including announcements, messages, cards, and videos. For each piece of content, you can define an even more specific audience than the overall Onboarding Plan! The aim is to deliver curated content and onboarding instructions on a dynamic, scheduled sequence. Notifications can be sent via email or SMS (if you have messaging set up) and can be branded with the Notification Designer.

Setup: Check out the PDFs on the Release Note that detail the new report fields and tasks. There’s so much to this feature, we may just dedicate an entire newsletter to it!

Notes:

Prior to receiving Workday login credentials, candidates with an accepted Offer access content from their Onboarding Plan via the External Pre-boarding site. However, once they log into to their Workday account, they lose access within the External site and are directed to their Onboarding Plan experience within the tenant.

Workday assigns Onboarding Plans to a worker based on the first condition rule met. So, the order of your audience and condition rules matters! Order the most targeted audiences at the top.

Workday intends to incorporate Learning videos as a possible selection for Onboarding Plan content in a future release.

🔗 Release Note

[6]

Feature: The Enhanced Cloud Connect for Learning Platform

Product: Cloud Connect for Learning

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: Workday’s new Cloud Connect for Learning (CCL) integration streamlines third-party content management with the Configure Cloud Connect for Learning task.

This update expands the fields sent via CCL, now supporting Author and Publisher (if compatible with the provider) and introducing two new external content types: Collection and Document. These values appear in the searchable facet filters of your Browse Learning Content and Manage Learning Content reports.

For existing CCL integrations, the transition is seamless—no need to regenerate credentials. Workday automatically migrates providers to the new platform and removes them from the older Configure External Content Provider task. Plus, more content providers are actively integrating, expanding your selection of External Content Providers soon 🤓

Setup:

1. Run the Maintain Functional Areas task. Filter the second column Functional Area for Cloud Connect for Learning. Then, select the checkbox in the fourth column Enabled.

2. Create a brand new Integration System User (ISU) or find the existing ISU for your CCL already in use. There should be one dedicated ISU per content provider.

3. Run the task Configure Cloud Connect for Learning and select the content provider.

4. In the tab titled Set Up Content and Content Provider, select the ISU from step 2 and input the content configuration settings.

5. In the tab titled Manage Content Catalog, select a default learning topic. You can edit this later once the import completes!

6. In the Manage Credentials step, generate credentials only if you’re adding a net new content provider. Else, take note of the existing content provider’s Client Secret field.

7. Work with the content provider to finish the process and confirm successful setup!

Notes:

The new CCL platform no longer supports channel selection. Keep this in mind if you’re integrating with an existing external learning provider that used channels.

The new CCL platform doesn't support the import of external skills. If you’ve enabled skills import with Udemy or Skillsoft Percipio, Workday recommends waiting to migrate to the new CCL once this element is accommodated in a future release.

🔗 Release Note

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