What steps can a payroll specialist take to transition into a role as a Functional Consultant for Workday?

Hi Bilaal, this is an excellent question!

The first step you can take is making sure you have access to the Workday Community. There's a lot of free training available to you that I encourage you to make time for. Furthermore, just reading through others' questions will help you learn.

The second thing is, share your goals with your leader! It's important that you get support to work on your career so you don't have to do all your learning after hours. It could easily be part of your day-to-day role if they're on the same page as you. Communicate and state your ideas clearly and with purpose. Have them understand the benefits of you learning more things cross-functionally.

Third: when issues arise, try to troubleshoot them on your own. Try to understand why issues occur so that you can own them more, even if you cannot personally fix them in the tenant yourself.

And the last thing to do: connect with colleagues that do the work already! Ask them questions and see if it's possible to shadow their work to learn more. If they help you with an issue, have them explain how they fixed it, or shadow them during the update.

I hope these ideas help and wish you the best of luck in your Workday career!

We also provide an opportunity for individuals like yourself to get into Workday consulting here at Kognitiv. Twice per year we bring in groups of individuals who are looking to transition their career into Workday consulting, or have just graduated from college/university. We teach you everything you need to know in order to be a successful consultant, and provide a ton of training and a dedicated mentor to you. We will start to recruit for next year's program in September/October, so keep an eye on our job postings for when that goes live!

You can also learn more about it here: https://careers.kognitivinc.com/early-careers

Wishing you all the best!