Not So Basic Training: FST Training Team prepares to deliver

The go-live date of Workday Financials is a good 18 months away.  But if you know the UVAFinance training team, it won’t surprise you that they’ve been busy for quite some time now, developing a training strategy that will enable users to be ready on day one.

Patty Marbury, Training Lead for the FST project, along with her Deloitte consulting partner Zelda Speight, recently conducted benchmarking interviews with peer institutions that had gone live with Workday Financials.  The aim of the interviews was to inform UVA’s training plans and to note the lessons our peers learned in the course of developing and delivering their Workday training.

Marbury and her colleagues learned a lot from their conversations, and there were a few key threads on what worked well and what didn’t in terms of training. One of the most important threads, she notes, was the importance of having a variety of training offerings.

“What we heard from our colleagues reinforced our own ideas,” she says, adding that “It was clear that having a diverse range of modalities for a variety of learners and circumstances is the best way to go.”

Multiple, easy to use training options meet multiple learning styles, notes Marbury.  Her team is planning on offering in-person and virtual training, as well as job aids, office hours, and more.

Another commonality in successful training across the institutions interviewed was training content centered around the role a user’s role in Workday, which is also a part of the FST training team's plan.

Marbury says her team will begin creating content this spring, developing a curriculum, a training plan, and calendar, and working with the functional team on the role mapping that will enable them to deliver focused training.

In the meantime, Marbury and her team will continue their immersion in the project, imbedded in the workstreams, working with stakeholders across UVA, to understand both the ins and outs of the transition to Workday and the needs of those who will use it.

Delivering training for Workday Financials is an admittedly intense undertaking, says Marbury, but it’s one she and her team are excited to take on. 

“We’ve been serving the UVA finance community for years, and here on the cusp of something new and exciting, we wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but partnering with that community to help make this transition as smooth as it can be,” she says.

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You can read more from Patty Marbury in the Online Community 

Keep watch here in the UVAFinance blog and our other ComsChannels  for more news as the training team continues its work.