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Context

Workday continuously improves the Workday Skills Cloud: the vocabulary of Skills that powers Skill features across Workday. Four times a year, on the first Wednesday of February, May, August, and November, Workday runs a background process that rolls out the latest version of this vocabulary to every tenant. Impacted Skills in your tenant are automatically replaced by their latest Skills Cloud version. A Skill can be affected in three ways:
  • Canonical Added: a new canonical Skill is introduced.
  • Skill Deprecated: an outdated Skill is retired.
  • Synonym Added: a Skill is merged into a canonical Skill as a synonym, and references to it are moved to the canonical Skill.
This cadence is part of how Workday keeps Skill data accurate and up to date; see the Workday Skills Cloud Ontology: Insights and Cadence release note and future related release notes for the full details.

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Updates in Workday

Workday announces each update through the Skills Cloud Updates report. The report is made available on the first Wednesday of the update month and remains available in Production tenants for 28 days, until the update takes effect. Users with access receive a Workday notification when the report is ready. To view the report:
  1. Make sure you have the required permissions. The report is secured to the Skills Cloud Updates domain; typically the HR Administrator, Integration Administrator, and Talent Administrator security groups have access. You can verify the configuration in your tenant with the View Security for Securable Item task, searching for “Skills Cloud Updates”.
  2. Open the Skills Cloud Updates report by typing its name in the Workday search bar.
The report shows two key dates:
  • Task Last Updated Date: when Workday last refreshed the report’s contents.
  • Effective Date of Skills Cloud Update: when Workday migrates the listed Skills in your tenant, 28 days after the Task Last Updated Date.
For each impacted Skill, the report lists the Skill in your tenant, the Skills Cloud Skill that replaces it, the change type, and usage counts showing where the Skill is referenced (Employees, Job Profiles, Job Postings, and so on), so you can assess the impact before the changes take effect. Skills that are not referenced in your tenant, but updated, are not in the report. For broader questions about Skills Cloud itself, Workday maintains a Workday Skills Cloud FAQ on Workday Community, with more documentation in the Community space itself too.

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How TechWolf handles these updates

TechWolf allows customers to choose Workday as their preferred Skills language. Workday Skills are then shown in all downstream applications, such as the Skill Assistant, the Console, or any other application built on top of the SkillEngine API. TechWolf applies the same vocabulary changes as Workday to that environment, timed around Workday’s rollout, so that the Skills you see through TechWolf stay consistent with the Skills in your Workday tenant. However, this process happens gradually. Here is the specific process:
  • 28 days in advance, Workday makes the Skills Cloud Updates report available.
  • At the same time, the TechWolf Console informs Console users about the upcoming changes, including a report of the exact changes that will be applied. The list of Skills lets you understand which Skills are affected.
  • The notification also indicates the time window in which you may see inconsistencies between Workday and what is visible in the Console.
  • TechWolf applies the vocabulary update right before Workday’s update: the TechWolf update is executed at a fixed time shortly before the earliest Workday rollout (1am UTC+13), and the transition is complete once Workday’s own rollout has fully finished.
  • Workday’s rollout itself can start somewhat later than 1am local Workday tenant time, and can take multiple hours to complete. Your tenant’s local time depends on the Workday data center region your tenant is hosted in.
The exact combined process is as follows:
  1. On the first Wednesday of February, May, August and November, Workday generates the impact report at 1am local datacenter timezone.
  2. Workday’s failure resilience retries up to 5 times to generate it, the report itself taking ~45 seconds.
  3. Right after the report is finished becoming available, the timestamp is marked. That timestamp is now between 1am + 45 seconds local time and 1am + 5 retries * 5 minutes + 45 seconds (= 01:25:45am) local time.
  4. Exactly 28 days later, Workday starts rolling out the Skills Cloud update. If your tenant got the report at 01:10:45am, it is likely close to that same time.
  5. Some time before that, at 1am UTC+13, TechWolf rolls out the vocabulary update already. This means that customers in the east get the update right before their Workday tenant updates, while customers more west will have more time between the TechWolf update and the Workday update in their timezone.
  6. Workday is rolling out the change, which can take up to 1 hour. The process is resilient, so will pick up failed changes at each next hour as long as there are failures.
  7. The Workday update is done, the TechWolf update has passed, meaning that at this point, everything is consistent again. The inconsistencies are limited to a timespan of < 24 hours.
To mitigate inconsistencies even more, the TechWolf Console also presents an overview of which Skills changed; not only the Skills already in use, but all changing Skills. This can help you work more safely, knowing what will change.

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What do I need to do?

While the update is rolling out, you should prevent performing governance exercises that require exact Skills to be kept during the exercises. Even 28 days before it might already be interesting to you to be aware that Skills will be changing in the Workday Skills Cloud and correspondingly, in TechWolf. Additionally, because these improvements, much like TechWolf’s own vocabulary updates, are intended to improve the quality and consistency of your Skill data, it is important to understand that this is a required part of the process. Workday and TechWolf are ever-evolving systems, and with the right level of reporting on what exactly is changing, you should be comfortable with the changes made during these updates.

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References