With Workday 2026R2, the legacy Change Job experience will be fully retired. The Enhanced Change Job Experience and Change Job Templates will become mandatory for all tenants, and organisations that haven’t yet made the switch will be automatically converted.
While Workday will handle the conversion, the impact will depend on how Change Job is currently configured in your tenant.
What you need to know
- The legacy Change Job experience is being retired. From 2026R2, the Enhanced Change Job Experience will be mandatory.
- Workday will automatically convert remaining tenants. Existing legacy templates will be migrated and, where required, new Change Job Templates will be created.
- The impact goes beyond the user interface. Templates, field visibility, security configuration, in-progress Change Job events and existing user guidance can all be affected.
- Security deserves particular attention. The automatic security conversion doesn’t apply in every scenario, so existing field access and visibility should be reviewed.
- Use Preview to validate your setup. Following the Previe, the conversion will run again in Preview, providing an opportunity to review the outcome before Production.
- Production is 19 September 2026. The conversion will run automatically, whether or not you have reviewed the impact beforehand.
From optional adoption to mandatory conversion
The Enhanced Change Job Experience is designed to simplify the Change Job process for both end users and administrators, with a more streamlined interface and greater flexibility through Change Job Templates. For organisations already using the enhanced experience, much of this may be familiar. For those still using the legacy experience, Workday will perform the conversion as part of 2026R2.
Existing templates using the Start Job Change initiating action will be updated to use the enhanced experience. Any new Change Job templates created after the conversion will automatically use the enhanced UI, meaning it will no longer be possible to create templates using the legacy experience.
Workday may create new Change Job Templates
Where templates don’t already exist, Workday will create separate templates for:
- Change Job
- Request Transfer
- Change Location, if this action is currently configured on the corresponding business process policy
- Change Contingent Worker, if this action is currently configured on the corresponding business process policy
What Workday creates and configures will therefore depend on your existing tenant setup.
Pay particular attention to security and field access
This is one of the areas we recommend looking at closely. The legacy and enhanced Change Job experiences handle field security differently. As part of the conversion, Workday can translate existing staffing domain security into field-level configuration within Configure Optional Fields.
There is, however, an important distinction:
- If your tenant doesn’t have an active template for the Change Job initiating action, Workday can perform the security configuration conversion.
- If you already have an active Change Job template, this security conversion won’t run. In this case, Workday recommends reviewing your security configuration and updating the relevant field configuration in Configure Optional Fields where needed.
This matters because fields that were previously hidden or restricted through staffing security domains may behave differently in the enhanced experience if the corresponding field configuration isn’t reviewed.
To support this review, Workday provides the View Configure Optional Fields for Change Job Before and After Conversion report, which shows the results of the conversion.
Don’t forget your Quick Tips
If you currently use Quick Tips to guide users through Change Job, these also require attention. Existing Quick Tips configured for the legacy experience won’t display on the converted Change Job Templates. Where required, they will need to be reconfigured through Guidance Workspace for the relevant templates. It’s a relatively small configuration detail, but one that can have a noticeable impact on users who rely on that guidance.
Use Preview to understand the impact
The conversion doesn’t first happen when 2026R2 reaches Production. It initially ran in Preview on 26 June. Following the Preview refresh with Production tenant data on 15 August, the conversion was run again in Preview. This is the opportunity to review how your current configuration is converted and test your Change Job workflows before the Production Release on 19 September.
We recommend checking:
- Are the expected Change Job Templates available?
- Are the right fields visible and editable for the right users?
- Do your key Change Job and Request Transfer scenarios work as expected?
- Are relevant subprocesses included correctly?
- Are in-progress events behaving as expected?
- Is existing user guidance still available where needed?
What if you don’t take action?
The conversion will still run automatically in Production on 19 September. The question is therefore no longer whether to adopt the Enhanced Change Job Experience, but whether you understand how the mandatory conversion will affect your current setup before it reaches Production.
The impact will differ between organisations depending on existing templates, security and business process configuration.
Our recommendation for 2026R2
Don’t treat Enhanced Change Job as just a new interface. The 2026R2 change also touches templates, security, field configuration, in-progress events and user guidance. Workday takes care of the automatic conversion, but you’ll still want to validate the outcome for your organisation.
Use the Preview window to review the converted configuration and test the Change Job scenarios that matter to your business, with particular attention to field access and security.
Need support understanding the Workday 2026R2 changes relevant to your configuration? Get in touch with your SuccessDay us to discuss your release preparation.
