PLEASANTON, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 29, 2015) - Workday, Inc. (NYSE: WDAY), a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, today unveiled Workday Learning, a new application intended to offer a more personalized, meaningful learning experience for organizations to evolve and encourage career development at every stage of the employee lifecycle. Workday Learning will be built into the fabric of Workday's unified suite of applications including Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and Workday Financial Management, providing customers with a single system to cultivate their workforce, close talent gaps, and drive business growth.
Announced at Workday Rising Las Vegas 2015, Workday Learning embodies a shift from talent management to people enablement focused on engaging individuals with more rewarding, diverse work experiences that drive greater alignment between employee development, workforce productivity, and better business outcomes.
A Continuous, Meaningful Learning Experience that Knows the Learner
Traditional learning management systems (LMS) are generally perceived as lackluster, tedious, and uninspiring. They sit outside of daily work, lack a connection to an employee's day-to-day needs, and do not provide the kind of training that will help an individual progress in his or her current role.
Built with the learner's needs in mind and incorporating feedback from employees at organizations including athenahealth, California College of the Arts, Cornell University, and McKee Foods, Workday Learning will address the gaps that exist with current learning management systems. Taking advantage of rich data from Workday HCM, Workday Learning will offer an intuitive, meaningful learning experience that knows the learner and recognizes where the individual sits in the employee lifecycle -- whether it's the first day on the job, a new manager, or someone cultivating core skills and expertise in a current role.
Workday Learning is intended to provide customers with:
- A Collaborative Community to Gain and Share Knowledge - Leveraging the latest collaboration and social learning technologies, Workday will enable employees to consume, create, and share content on any device, at any time. Whether it's shooting and sharing a video tutorial from a smartphone, or flipping through pages of training material on a tablet, Workday Learning will encourage an interactive community for learning, teaching, and coaching that meets the needs of today's digital workforce.
- Content with Context - Workday Learning will be able to recognize users and make tailored learning recommendations based on who they are, what they do, and their stage in the employee lifecycle. For example, the system could recommend a video to a new manager, accounting for personal preferences and learning experiences completed by others in similar roles or at a similar stage in their career.
- Support for Diverse Learning Experiences - Workday Learning will enable customers to fully support a wide spectrum of developmental experiences spanning short, easy-to-digest micro learning activities and in-depth jumbo learning programs as well as mandatory certification and compliance training.
- Built-in Measurement and Insights - In combination with Workday HCM and Workday Financial Management, Workday Learning will equip customers with complete visibility into day-to-day learning activities and overall learning effectiveness. For example, a team manager could quickly understand how employees are tracking against individual development plans, and organizational leaders could better identify and optimize learning initiatives that positively impact business goals.
Availability
Workday plans to make Workday Learning generally available to customers in the second half of calendar year 2016.
Comments on the News
"Our customers have made it clear that they need a progressive solution that enables them to offer more personalized learning, development, and career opportunities in order to engage and retain their best people," said Leighanne Levensaler, senior vice president, products, Workday. "Workday Learning will be seamlessly unified with Workday's suite of applications to provide a smarter, more intuitive system that knows employees, what kind of work they do, and what they need to achieve job and career success. As a result, employees will be empowered to connect more and share relevant content with each other -- creating a collaborative work environment where learning is continuous and ubiquitous."
"Having the opportunity to help shape several Workday products over the years has proven that Workday not only cares about what we as customers need, but seeks to understand our experiences and create something far better than we had imagined," said Mark Newsome, director of human resources, McKee Foods. "Workday delivers on what it promises and creates viable alternatives to some of the old, stale offerings we often see in the marketplace. I am confident Workday Learning will be a fresh, new approach that addresses the gaps that traditional learning environments have struggled with for so long, without sacrificing the core infrastructure needed in a learning system."
"Workday Learning has the potential to solve distinct challenges higher education institutions face in meeting the training needs of their staff, faculty, and larger community," said Mara Hancock, chief information officer and vice president of technology, California College of the Arts. "Learning built into Workday HCM will serve as a community-wide tool that can help overcome many of the boundary limitations found in a traditional LMS where the line between community members are hardened, and social and collaboration components are bolted on rather than unified in one system."
"Learning and career development are among the leading drivers of employee engagement and organizational success," said Josh Bersin, principal, Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP. "With floods of expert content now available, much of it published in video and mobile format, companies need a unified and compelling platform to help make learning discoverable and personalized. With its focus on making learning content easy to find, produce, share, and intelligently recommended, Workday Learning has the potential to improve the employee learning experience."
Additional Information
Please visit the Workday blog for additional perspective about Workday Learning:
About Workday
Workday is a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources. Founded in 2005, Workday delivers financial management, human capital management, and analytics applications designed for the world's largest companies, educational institutions, and government agencies. More than 1,000 organizations, ranging from medium-sized businesses to Fortune 50 enterprises, have selected Workday.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, statements regarding the expected performance and benefits of Workday's offerings. The words "believe," "may," "will," "plan," "expect," and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. If the risks materialize or assumptions prove incorrect, actual results could differ materially from the results implied by these forward-looking statements. Risks include, but are not limited to, risks described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended July 31, 2015 and our future reports that we may file with the SEC from time to time, which could cause actual results to vary from expectations. Workday assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.
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