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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2025-07-25
Setup Considerations: Job Changes

Setup Considerations: Job Changes

This topic is relevant to the legacy change job experience. We plan to retire this topic in a future release.
You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of the
Change Job
 business process. It explains:
  • Why to set it up.
  • How it fits into the rest of Workday.
  • Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
  • Security requirements and business process configurations.
  • Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What It Is

You can set up job change workflows by configuring and combining tasks and business processes. Example: Transferring a worker initiates a change in benefits and requires the approval of an HR administrator.
The main process to consider is the
Change Job
 business process, which controls most job changes between a worker's
Hire
 and
Termination
 events, including:
  • Demotions.
  • Job data changes.
  • Lateral moves.
  • Location changes.
  • Promotions.
  • Transfers between managers and organizations.
You can enable the
Change Job
 business process to use machine learning to provide recommendations for common fields when a user is completing a job change.

Business Benefits

Change Job
 is intuitive and configurable, enabling you to:
  • Minimize manual error.
  • Limit the training required for users to perform job changes.
  • Configure related events as subprocesses.
You can modify the overall process to suit the needs of your organization. Example: Requiring specific tasks or skipping unnecessary fields based on the job change reason. You can also add a range of nonstaffing tasks as subprocesses that can display and route differently based on many factors, including:
  • Who initiates
  • How users initiate
  • Location
  • Organization or manager
  • Reason
  • Worker type
Once you set up the
Change Job
 business process, Workday enables the appropriate users to access and complete the steps.

Use Cases

  • Converting individual contributors into managers by assigning other workers to their supervisory organizations.
  • Creating and managing internal job requisitions and applications.
  • Initiating processes such as compensation changes, location changes, and onboarding new hires.
  • Changing an employee's job to a domestic assignment.
  • Moving managers or whole teams between organizations.
  • Moving workers from 1 manager to another.

Questions to Consider

Question
Considerations
What does your ideal process look like for job changes?
Consider the current or planned job change processes for your organization. Decide what works and what you'd like to change. Plan your processes and changes before configuring them in Workday.
Having a thorough understanding of your ideal workflow can help you make decisions regarding configuration.
Which of your organizations do job changes affect, and how do their requirements differ?
You can configure separate
Change Job
 business process definitions for different organizations. Examples:
  • You can create a definition for U.S.-based workers and a separate definition for workers based in the UK.
  • You can create a definition for managers that includes the
    Approval
     step and a separate definition for HR Administrator roles that skips the
    Approval
     step.
You can also use condition rules to modify the workflow for each definition. Rule-based definitions are more efficient for high-volume transactions than definitions with the same condition repeated for multiple steps. Example: You can create a rule-based definition that evaluates workers for full-time status, instead of creating multiple steps requiring workers to be full-time employees.
You can also configure rule-based consolidated templates to enable initiators to complete some subprocesses during a job change based on condition rules.
What other steps do you want to include when you make job changes?
You can add tasks as steps on the
Change Job
 business process, including:
  • Assign Pay Group
  • Onboarding
  • Propose Compensation Change
Access the
Business Process Configuration Options
 report to find a full list of tasks that you can add to initiate subprocesses on the
Change Job
 business process.
How do you want to be able to initiate job changes?
Workday enables you to decide which roles can initiate and approve job changes and which roles those changes affect. Users with access can initiate job changes from:
  • Dashboards
  • Global search
  • REST API
  • Worker Profile
How far in the past do you want each role to be able to make job changes?
Retroactive job changes can affect other processes, including Staffing tasks, Payroll processes, and downstream integrations. You can configure a maximum date in the past to apply retroactive job changes.
Example: You create a custom validation to ensure that managers can only make job changes up to a month in the past. However, you enable HR administrators to make job changes as far back as they need to.
What should your users be able to see and do when completing job changes?
You can create simplified job changes for initiators, reviewers, and approvers using the
Maintain Change Job Templates
 task. These templates enable you to control what information is visible and editable when users access the
Start Job Change
 initiation, review, and approval steps.
You can also enable an enhanced user interface for templates to simplify the user experience.
You can also configure a variety of tools to help people complete job changes, such as:
  • Custom help text on certain tasks.
  • Custom validation rules that ensure users enter data accurately.
  • Dynamically updating default values for certain fields based on changes users make to other fields
  • Embedded analytics worklets to display additional data.
  • Guided tours.
  • Quick tips.
Do you want to provide machine learning recommendations for users when they complete job changes?
You can opt in to share data categories with Workday. Once you opt in, it takes approximately 2 weeks for Workday to process your data and present recommendations. To use the most relevant data, we recommend that you enable this feature in your production tenant.
The recommendations depend on the volume of your contributed data. We recommend that you have historical data before you use this feature.

Recommendations

  • Create change job templates to help users complete job changes more efficiently. You can configure templates based on job change scenarios for your organization.
  • We recommend that you plan for all possible job change scenarios. Consider what you want job changes to look like within your organization and what scenarios you want to prevent.
  • The
    Change Job
     default definition includes all required steps in the correct order. Modify the default definition only as much as necessary to accomplish your business needs. Test often during configuration to reduce errors.
  • Revisit your job change configurations whenever you implement new tools and business processes in Workday
  • Create change job templates to help users complete job changes more efficiently.

Requirements

You might need to take additional steps to enable this feature depending on your organization's subscription service agreement. For more information, see this Community article.
You need to set up the
Change Job
 business process to manage workers in Workday.

Limitations

We don't support translations for the Machine Learning Recommendations for Change Job feature.

Tenant Setup

You can specify what options automatically populate on a job change, including:
  • Headcount options.
  • Organizations for job management.
You can also specify whether you want to enable job overlap when assigning workers to positions.
You can view tenant setup options that impact
Change Job
 in these sections of the
Edit Tenant Setup - HCM
 task:
  • Staffing
  • Job Requisitions
  • Leave of Absence

Security

The security domain policies for these events affect which security groups can access the related sections on the
Change Job
 business process:
  • Change Job
  • Change Organization Assignments
  • Propose Compensation Change
Anyone with access to the
Staffing Actions: Compensation for All Job Profiles
 domain can view the compensation ranges of all job profiles.
The initiator’s access to a Supervisory Organization determines the visibility of many Change Job fields. As a result, Workday might dynamically hide fields and sections from a user.
The enhanced user interface doesn't apply domain security configurations for all Staffing Actions security domains except
Staffing Actions: Change Job Date and Reason
. Instead, the interface uses a combination of business process security policy, template configuration, and configuration of optional fields to determine the change job information displayed to a user.

Business Processes

Your job change setup can affect downstream events, such as the:
  • Assign Pay Group
     business process.
  • Change Benefit Elections
     business process.
  • Change Organization Assignments for Worker
     business process.
  • Maintain Employee Contract
     task.
  • Onboarding
     business process.
  • Propose Compensation Change
     business process.
  • Third-party integrations.
  • Job Profile
In-progress
Change Job
 events can block a worker's processes from initiating or completing.
Some business processes initiate
Change Job
 and might require specific business process definitions to function. Example:
Swap Positions
.

Reporting

Add the
Change Job
 task to the My Team Management dashboard to help managers track and manage job changes and time-sensitive tasks for their teams.
Add the
Start Job Change
 report to the worker profile to enable users to launch relevant job changes for a specific worker.
You can use the
View Document Template Details
 report to view document templates created with Workday Docs.

Integrations

  • You can use the
    jobChanges
     REST API to start and submit job changes. You can update worker information, such as:
    • Location.
    • Business Title.
    • Job Profile.
    • Position.
    • Job Classification.

Connections and Touchpoints

Change Job
 events can touch many other functional areas in Workday, including:
Features
Consideration
Benefits
Compensation
Onboarding
Payroll
Job changes enable you to change a worker's information which can affect their payroll and benefits processing. Some examples of job changes that impact payroll include position, location, organization, and compensation changes.
Time Tracking
When you change the worker's position using the
Change Job
 business process, Workday adds the new position to time blocks from the effective date of the change.
Recruiting
Recruiting transactions for internal candidates route to Change Job once the worker reaches the
Ready to Hire
phase.
Workday Docs
You can create document templates in Workday Docs to include on generate document steps for Change Job.
Example: When you transfer a worker to another country, the location change can affect their benefits, compensation, and onboarding information.
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships across your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.