Is Your Workday Student Design Built for Today’s Students?

A student system can work exactly as configured and still create barriers for students.

Colleges and universities now serve students with a wide range of educational backgrounds, responsibilities, schedules, and goals. Some attend full time and live on campus. Others balance part-time enrollment with employment and family responsibilities. Students may begin at one institution, transfer more than once, complete college credit in high school, study entirely online, move between programs, stop out, or return years later.

Workday Student provides institutions with an opportunity to support these different paths through connected information, workflows, academic planning, and self-service..  As a modern student information system (SIS), the platform offers tools to serve diverse learners, but the quality of the student experience still depends on institutional decisions

A modern student system does not automatically modernize the policies and processes operating within it. Institutions must intentionally design Workday Student around the students they serve and the many different paths those students take.

The Traditional Student Path Is No Longer the Only Path

Many higher education processes were originally designed around a predictable sequence. A student graduates from high school, begins college in the fall, enrolls full time, remains in one program, attends in person, and graduates within four years.

That path remains relevant, but it no longer represents every student.

A transfer student may arrive with coursework from several institutions. An adult learner may take one or two courses at a time. An online student may never visit a campus office. A dual-enrollment student may complete a year or more of college coursework before officially becoming a first-year student. A returning student may come back under different program requirements, academic policies, or technology.

Students experience the institution from different starting points. They also bring different levels of familiarity with higher education. Some understand terms such as academic standing, prerequisite, satisfactory academic progress, and program of study. Others do not know which office manages a particular decision or what an institutional message means.

Workday’s current Student materials recognize changing student expectations, new learner populations, and the need for flexible educational pathways. The platform provides tools that can support those needs, but institutions remain responsible for defining the processes students encounter. 

Old Assumptions Can Follow Institutions Into a New System

Workday Student implementation requires hundreds of decisions about academic structures, eligibility, approvals, security, deadlines, communications, and exceptions. Many of those conversations begin with a review of the current process.

Understanding the current process is necessary. Deciding which parts belong in the new system is the harder and more valuable work.

A process may reflect a limitation of the legacy student system. It may depend on an office structure that has changed or on manual work performed by an employee who left years ago. An approval may exist because of a past problem that no longer applies. A deadline may assume that students are available during regular campus business hours.

Teams sometimes rebuild these steps because changing them takes longer than configuring them. A requirement may be written into policy, need committee approval, or depend on the next catalog cycle. By the time its purpose is questioned in a design session, there may be little time to change it before launch. 

A Workday Student implementation creates a valuable point of review. Teams can examine which requirements support policy, compliance, academic quality, or student service and which ones have remained in place without a clear purpose. Some controls and exceptions will stay, and should. The review is an opportunity to understand why each one exists and whether it still serves the institution. Institutions migrating from a legacy platform often find that these questions surface alongside data challenges, which we cover in our post on Banner data cleanup during Workday Student projects.

Self-Service Should Create Clarity

Self-service is an important part of the Workday Student experience. Students can access information, complete tasks, review academic progress, and participate in processes without relying on an employee to complete every transaction.

Access alone does not guarantee clarity.

A student may see a hold without understanding how to resolve it. An action item may appear without enough context to explain why it matters. A student may submit a request and receive no indication of which office owns the next step. An institutional term may be technically accurate while remaining unfamiliar to the person reading it.

In these situations, the process is available to the student, but the institutional complexity remains intact.

Effective self-service helps students understand what is happening, what action is required, and where to go for help. Instructions should use language students recognize. Notifications should provide meaningful direction. Tasks should appear at the appropriate point in the student journey. Ownership should be clear to both the student and the employees supporting the process.

The goal is to give students enough information to move forward with confidence, with a clear path to the full policy when they need it.

One Process Can Affect Student Populations Differently

The same process may feel straightforward to one student and difficult to another.

A residential student may have quick access to an advisor or campus office. An online student may be working during the hours that office is open. A continuing student may understand the registration process from prior terms, while a returning student may encounter a completely different experience. A first-time student may receive structured onboarding, while a transfer student enters the institution at another point in the cycle.

Implementation teams need student scenarios that reflect this variety.

Testing commonly confirms that a transaction can be completed. Stronger testing also evaluates whether the steps make sense to the person completing them. The difference matters. A process can produce the correct system result while creating confusion, delays, or additional work for students and employees.

Realistic scenarios should represent the institution’s enrollment patterns. They should include students with prior credit, multiple programs, nontraditional start terms, online enrollment, part-time schedules, interrupted attendance, and other circumstances that regularly occur on campus. We explore how to build these scenarios into user acceptance testing in our guide to Workday Student testing and UAT readiness.

This broader approach helps teams find issues before they become recurring service problems.

Student-Centered Design Is a Shared Responsibility

Students rarely see the organizational boundaries separating admissions, advising, the registrar, financial aid, student accounts, academic departments, and information technology. They experience one institution.

A single student question may cross several functional areas. Each office may complete its part correctly while the student still receives an incomplete or confusing experience. The gap usually appears between the steps, where ownership, communication, or timing has not been fully defined.

Workday Student can connect information and route work across functional areas. The institution must still determine who owns each decision, who can take action, how unresolved work is identified, and how students are kept informed.

Workday reported that higher education leaders are prioritizing stronger student experiences, streamlined processes for faculty and staff, and more unified institutional data. These priorities are closely connected. Clear ownership and access to reliable information help employees respond more consistently and allow students to make better-informed decisions. Read Workday’s higher education update.

Student-centered design requires shared decisions across every office a student touches, from admissions to student accounts.

Five Questions to Test Your Workday Student Design

Institutions can use five questions to evaluate processes during implementation, testing, and future optimization:

1. Which student populations may have difficulty completing this process?
   Consider differences in enrollment status, location, prior education, program structure, technology access, and familiarity with institutional terminology.
2. Can students complete the process without relying on informal knowledge?
   Students should not need to know which employee to email, which office handles an exception, or which unwritten step comes next.
3. Do students understand what is required and why?
   Clear language and useful instructions reduce confusion without requiring students to interpret institutional policy on their own.
4. Does the process support more than one student path?
   The design should account for the real variations found in the institution’s student population and treat them as expected paths.
5. Can employees see where work has stalled and who owns the next step?
   Visibility allows staff to address problems proactively instead of waiting for students to report them.

These questions bring the experience students have with the process into the discussion, next to whether the configuration produces the expected technical result.

Key Takeaways

• Workday Student, as a student information system (SIS), can support many student paths, but institutional decisions shape the experience.
• Modern technology can carry forward policies and assumptions created for an earlier student population.
• Self-service should give students clear information and direction.
• Testing should represent the students an institution actually serves.
• Strong student experiences depend on shared ownership across functional areas.

Final Thoughts

Workday Student gives colleges and universities an opportunity to reconsider how students interact with institutional processes. That opportunity extends beyond replacing a legacy system or moving transactions online.

The larger goal is to create processes that recognize how students attend college now. Students enter with different experiences, follow different timelines, and encounter different barriers. The system design should reflect that reality.

A modern student system should support students whose paths change direction, begin in different places, or take longer than expected. Reaching that goal requires thoughtful policy discussions, realistic testing, clear communication, and decisions grounded in the institution’s actual student population.

Institutions implementing or optimizing Workday Student can use this moment to evaluate whether their processes reflect the students they serve. David Kent Consulting helps higher education teams identify operational gaps, facilitate cross-functional conversations, and develop practical recommendations that connect system decisions with student needs.