If you want Workday Certification to work as an implementer, you have to work for WorkDay or it’s certified official partner.  My understanding is that your certifications are considered inactive when you are termed from a partner, until you start with another partner. Means you have to loose hopes on your certification when you leave that job. Again you have to look for a best employer who can offer you certification. In simple words, certification is under the control of your employer not under you.

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If you just want to get familiar with the system, any client of WorkDay’s could give you exposure in house, and could get you trained in a classroom, virtual classroom, or via training videos.

A lot of professional services (implementer) people come from the client side, so if you are having trouble getting into the pro services side, and that is your long term goal, going to a client could be a good short term strategy.

Answer from a realtime Workday Consultant:

I believe the cost for my comp training and for my payroll training was $5000. I am not certain how that was broken up – payroll is a longer training, so it may have been $3k, and comp $2k. I’m not sure how much the core HCM training was either – probably around $3k. However, individuals cannot enroll in the training. Also, these costs do not take into account travel and expenses – these courses were delivered in a classroom (payroll and HCM had practical sessions the next week that were done off site).

The only way to get certified on Workdays various modules is to work for Workday or a Workday implementation partner (like Collaborative Solutions, where I work). Your employer can then enroll you in classes. All new consultants take Core HCM, which is also known as Boot Camp, with a practical that covers data loading and building a basic, functional tenant. There are other modules you can take after that, such as Compensation, Payroll, Absence, Time Tracking, Financials, Integrations, and Benefits. They add more training as more modules are delivered.

There have been a few rare instances where a Workday client gets their staff enrolled in consultant training to implement functionality themselves.

At Workday Altitude (the annual Workday hosted professional services conference) last year, they said the average workday consultant has 1.3 certifications.

Workday rolls out a system update 3 times a year (they are currently rolling out version 19). This is across all clients, and is not optional. The benefit is that all users are on the same version, and usually there is minimal impact with each update – most new functionality must be adopted in the system to be used, and is delivered turned off. However, clients do have to perform testing to make sure their system still works – they have a window to do this in a sandbox system before they are converted to the new production system.

With each new update, you have to take recurrent training (web based) for all certifications. I have 3 certifications – Core HCM, Compensation, and Payroll. I do work across these disciplines, so I do need them, however, if I were to focus in just one area, it might be nice not to have to take the new content training certification every 4 months.

Workday is an exciting product, I like working with it a lot. A lot of bigger companies are getting into it now, and a lot of cutting edge companies are already on it (Salesforce.com, Facebook).

– Jeff McDonals, Collaberative Solutions, USA.

Another Consultant Experience in his words:
I do not feel the cost is relevant, since you can not buy or pay for this training yourself.  You must be a Workday employee or Workday Partner employee in order to be certified.  Therefore, the cost of the training is managed by Workday or the Partner, not the worker.

Workday has changed to a bi-annual upgrade schedule.  Workday is on version 25 now, and will be moving to 26 shortly.    This happens twice a year, and all certifications must be completed online by a specific date.  Once again, you can not be re-certified in the latest version unless you are a Workday employee or Workday Partner.

– Richards Simmons, Workday Consultant, Bay Area.

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• What is Workday?
• What are the main features of Workday Human Capital Management?
• As an employee, why might I use Workday?