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It’s now official.

Originally planned for 2025R2, after a year of delays (and a respectable amount of rework), the legacy Change Job framework is getting replaced by the new Change Job experience as part of 2026R2 for all Workday HCM customers — no more ifs, buts, or opt-outs about it.

Workday releases usually come with tons of nice-to-have and optional changes and about just as many low-impact mandatory updates.

But every once in a while, there's something BIG coming that hits like a truck 🚚 — and you better be prepared and ready. (Shoutout to those who lived through the retirement of the Compensation Plan Assignment Snapshot BO, iykyk.)

The overhaul of the Change Job experience is one of those biggies — and it comes with a “time to panic” label on it. As of Sept 19th, for those of you not yet using the new experience, your Change Job UI, templates, and security will get converted to the new framework automatically.

In today’s issue, we outline what’s changing and when. In the next couple of weeks, there are four Premium deep dives coming that — regardless of where you’re at with this setup — will give you the details, goodies, and gotcha’s you need to avoid unwanted errors and give your Change Job Templates the upgrade they’ve been missing.

So, without further ado… the “news”.

It's been a decades-long balancing act with Workday's Change Job process: should it be a true one-stop shop HCM workhorse for everything — including all sections and fields — or should it display only the relevant information, but for a billion different use cases/initiating actions?

Let's see where Workday landed with this and review all the changes hitting PROD with 2026R2 in order of visual to tactical.

This is the cleanest, most straightforward, and truly non-negotiable change. The new look and feel for Change Job (and its consolidated subprocesses) is coming, and the old UI is going away — it’s a facelift that definitely packs a punch!

The old way…

The new way…

If you currently have Change Job Templates set up that still use the old UI, those are also going to be automatically converted to the enhanced UI.

The promise?

An intuitive process, fewer pages/clicks, and a cleaner, much more user-friendly interface, “proven to both reduce time to transact and increase completion rates” 📈

While the page itself is undeniably better looking, not all customers find the changes thrilling, and their feedback has played a major role in the delays around this update.

We look at all the latest details, see where things stand today, and give our take on the matter in tomorrow’s Premium newsletter.

That’s right: all Change Job transactions are going 100% template-based after the Sep 19th conversion. This means that you get to define the sections, fields, and subprocesses you want to display in the various job change processes.

This affects all 5 single-target initiating actions available via the UI:

We explore everything there is to know about setting up your templates with all the nuances in the 3rd and 4th Premium newsletters of this series (yes, 2 whole newsletters because there really is that much to cover here).

In the good ol’ security framework (and, for many of us, current), access to the Change Job process and its subprocess Change Org Assignments is defined by:

With 2026R2, the BP policies stay untouched, but all domain-based access gets translated into a Configure Optional Fields setup (with a bit of it splashing over into Maintain Functionality for Staffing Transactions). This allows for super-granular, field-level config, leaving the old domain-based approach in the dust 💨

With the automatic conversion, your old security setup gets automatically moved to the brand new security engine, without any impact to existing accesses/functionality. Or that’s the plan, at least — safe harbor is strong with this one! 😬

⚠️ The security conversion only takes place if you DON’T yet have an active template configured for the Change Job initiating action! ⚠️

You may already be using the new security engine, and if that’s the case, good on ya! Tag along to make sure your setup is well built (and there are no surprises) 😉

If you’re not one of the lucky orgs, though, we recommend you let Workday do the heavy lifting via the automatic conversion running in your PROD on Sep 19th (instead of scrambling to reconfigure things manually). Thorough testing is still a must, though.

We’ll show ya what the security conversion does (like, exactly), what to look out for, and how to test things step-by-step in the last Premium installment of this series.

Let’s review the cornerstone dates of this transition period.

June 26th: The conversion to the new Change Job experience took place in Preview tenants, so you can already start testing there (this was not a full tenant refresh, though!).

📍 Aug 4th (the publish date of this Newsletter!): Overview of the upcoming, mandatory 2602R2 Change Job UI + template + security conversion changes taking place.

Aug 5th: Change Job Enhanced UI Deep Dive.

Aug 12th: Change Job Templates Part I and II (two pieces, a double newsletter day! 👯)

Aug 15th: Standard mandatory refresh of Preview tenants, marking the start of the 5-week release testing period. The automatic Change Job conversion runs again. (The refresh technically starts at 8 pm CT on Aug 14th, so be careful with last-minute shenanigans!)

Aug 19th: Last newsletter in the series covering the Change Job security conversion.

Sep 19th: 2026R2 release hits PROD. The automatic Change Job conversion runs in PROD (for the first and last time). This is your final deadline to finish all testing and get 100% comfy with your new Change Job framework.

💡 Hint: you can ask for a Sandbox Preview tenant refresh any time before Sep 19th, and the conversion will run again! And again! Aaand again! What’s more, you can also opt to refresh any of your impl tenants as a Preview tenant, with the same result. Great for testing.

Here Change Job Templates come 🏈

We'll get right down to brass tacks in tomorrow’s Premium Newsletter, starting the series with the new and enhanced UI — diving into the good, the bad, and the ugly of it!

Hope to see ya there 🤓

Written by Dániel Cseh, Resident Writer at Well Built — HRIT Manager and foosball enthusiast from Budapest. Read more from Dániel on Well Built.

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