Earlier this week, Workday released and updated roadmap for Workday Student. With Workday 33, improvements are slated for virtually all functional areas of Workday Student, including Student Core, Recruiting and Admissions, Student Engagement, Financial Aid, Student Financials, Student Records and Academic Advising.
While Workday has relied on its community brainstorming strategy to garner feedback on the most pressing feature needs of its customers, the company makes a radical departure in the current roadmap. The roadmap proactively addresses areas that customers have not requested in brainstorms. This type of forward-thinking strategy continues to position Workday for greater success in a saturated SaaS package solution market.
Some of the more exciting features coming in Workday 33 for Recruiting and Admissions include the Recommenders feature. Recommenders will hence be able to access an institution’s external site to provide recommendations on a student and to upload supporting documents. This feature is a game change for many institutions but will be particularly useful for recommenders and students.
Another area of major enhancement is in the Student Core functional area. At a time when college sports and athletics have become so popular, the addition of integration with external athletic systems will add great value. There will also be a centralized document management feature for students documents. Workday promises to enhance security in this area so that documents are secured by type. Also desirable is the enhanced parent experience which will support the ability of parents to manage multiple children’s accounts through one login.
Workday has laid out a solid roadmap that conveys the message that it plans to dominate the higher education market. This is welcome news for all stakeholders of Workday Student, especially institutions making major investments to replace their aging systems.
Ejike Eze, Ph.D.
@ejikeeze