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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2026-06-12
Concept: Career Path Builder

Concept: Career Path Builder

The Career Path Builder in Career Hub Explore enables workers to create and save career paths. Workday surfaces paths through a series of job profiles, with each step including actionable career development opportunities and suggestions. The Career Path Builder uses career and job profile data, the Skills Cloud, and skill interests to power machine-learning inferences and suggestions. You can also enable suggestions based on:
  • Historical job transitions.
  • Career paths that you define for your organization.
Career paths enhance worker awareness of internal career options, which improves talent retention and career mobility. Engaged workers can identify and pursue specific skills that prepare them for future career moves.

Career Path Sources

Employees can build career paths from up to 4 different sources:
  • Paths Taken by Others in Your Role
    : Suggests common next moves from the worker’s current role based on historical job transition data.
  • Skill Interests
    : Suggests next moves that match the worker’s skill interests.
  • Skills
    : Suggests next moves that match the worker’s job profile skills.
  • Paths Suggested by Your Organization
    : Surfaces career paths that you define for your organization. We only display career paths that include the worker’s current job profile.
When employees select
Paths Suggested by Your Organization
, they can view and save complete paths. For the other options, employees build their own career paths by adding next moves from 1 or more sources.
Employees can view up to 15 moves for each step of the career path, or up to 15 career paths suggested by your organization. Workday ranks suggestions by the strength of the skills match, or by frequency of job transitions on the
Paths Taken by Others in Your Role
 source.

Machine Learning Suggestions for Next Moves

The
Skill Interests
 and
Skills
 source options use machine learning.
The first suggested move is based on the worker's:
  • Explicit skill interests or explicit skills on their worker profile, and
  • Skills inferred by machine learning from the worker's current job profile, including the job title, job description, additional job description, job profile summary, and job family.
After a user selects the initial job profile suggestion, Workday bases subsequent suggested moves on the explicit and inferred skills of the selected job profile.

Company-Defined Career Paths

When employees view paths suggested by your organization, Workday prioritizes the paths by how well the employee’s skills match the first suggested career step.
We don’t surface career paths:
  • That don’t include the employee’s current job profile.
  • With any private or inactive job profiles.
  • That the employee already saved.
  • Where the employee is already at the most senior role.

Source Data for Career Path Builder Suggestions

Depending on which sources you want to use, consider these best practices to prepare your tenant for Career Path Builder:
  • For
    Skills
     and
    Skill Interests
    :
    • Add 5-10 skills to each public job profile.
    • Instruct your employees to add 10-20 skills and 5-10 skill interests. They can add this information on their worker profile or in the
      Career Hub
      .
  • For
    Paths Taken by Others in Your Role
    :
    • Workday recommends having ample job transition history data. Job architecture refreshes can take an average of 12 months for the transition data to reflect the new career moves.
    • We only suggest public job profiles for this source. See FAQ: Opportunity Graph for details about how we calculate suggestions.
  • For
    Paths Suggested by Your Organization
    :
    • Before setting up company-defined career paths, consider any changes that you’re planning for your job architecture and career frameworks.
      When you make a job profile in a company-defined career path inactive or private, employees who saved the path can’t view that profile in their saved paths. When you edit a company-defined career path after employees save it to their plan, their saved career paths don’t change. To view the updated career path, they need to delete their saved path and return to the Career Path Builder.
    • If you restrict job profile visibility by country or organization, we don’t apply the restrictions in the Career Path Builder. Employees may get job suggestions that aren’t available for their location or organization.
      To create a company-defined career path that is valid for all employees who can view it, ensure all of its job profiles have the same restrictions, or are unrestricted. For details, see Restrict Job Profiles by Country and Organization.

Sharing Career Paths

When you implement the
Manager Insights Hub
, you can also enable employees to share a career path with their manager, making it easier for managers to support employee upskilling, career growth, and internal mobility.
When employees first save a career path, it is private. When they share a career path, their manager receives a notification and can view the career path and a skills match analysis in the
Manager Insights Hub
.
An employee can share only 1 path at a time. If there is already a shared path, it becomes private when the employee shares a new one.

Maintain Career Hub and Opportunity Marketplace

Using the
Maintain Career Hub and Opportunity Marketplace
 task, you can choose to rank suggested job profiles primarily by seniority instead of skills.
  • You can select
    Job Level
     or
    Management Level
     to limit suggested job profiles to within 1 job level or management level of the active role, and prioritize them in order of:
    • Moves 1 level upwards.
    • Moves at the same level. Workday only surfaces these moves if there are no more suggestions available at 1 level upwards.
    • Moves 1 level downwards, if there are no more suggestions at 1 level upwards or at the same level.
    With this setup, skills match is a secondary criteria for ranking suggested job profiles.
  • You can specify whether seniority is ascending or descending in the hierarchy.
  • You can choose whether to determine the seniority of job or management levels using the levels’ decimal-based prefixes or their
    Order
    .
  • To increase the relevance of job suggestions, you can limit them to the employee’s current job family or job family group.