Case Study · Research · Workday
A roadmap built on evidence, not assumptions.
A 900+ respondent survey across 45+ job families became the roadmap that set Workday's Product and Technology learning priorities for FY23.
Case Study · Research · Workday
A 900+ respondent survey across 45+ job families became the roadmap that set Workday's Product and Technology learning priorities for FY23.
The Problem
Workday's Product and Technology org spanned product managers, developers, and QA engineers, a wide enough range that assuming their learning needs would have been a guess. I ran a survey across 45+ job families instead, and got responses from 900+ people, over 10% of every organization in scope, enough to build a roadmap on evidence instead of instinct.
What the Survey Found
Leadership over technical
Leadership and communication skills topped the list of requested training, ahead of technical asks like front-end development, AWS, and machine learning.
Time, not access
Time was the dominant learning barrier, named by 57% of respondents. The gap wasn't a lack of content or tools, it was finding room for either.
Learning culture, already decent
Sentiment toward the existing learning culture scored 6.6 to 7.1 out of 10 across the three lead indicators we tracked, a reasonable foundation to build on rather than a problem to fix first.
Role & Approach
Role
I designed and ran the needs analysis, then translated the findings into the FY23 Learning and Enablement roadmap for the org.
Structure
The roadmap was built around three pillars: culture of learning, addressing the time barrier and reinforcing what was already working; current skills, closing the leadership and communication gap the survey surfaced; and future technical readiness, keeping the technical asks on the roadmap without letting them crowd out what people actually asked for first.
Budget & vendor stewardship
The findings also gave me a case to make with our two licensed learning platforms, Udemy and Pluralsight. I used the data to advocate for the Product and Technology org, pushed both vendors to adjust their curriculum roadmaps to match what people actually asked for, and shifted license spend toward whichever platform fit a given skill best instead of splitting the budget evenly by default.
Artifacts
Outcome
The survey set the FY23 priorities for the Product and Technology org's learning program: leadership development first, technical skills kept in view, and the time barrier treated as a design constraint rather than an excuse. I don't have downstream adoption numbers confirmed for this one, so I'm not reporting any here.