We Don't Need the Jacket. We Need the Leverage.

The practitioner party has been going on for years. The vendor just hasn't shown up. Yet.

tldr; The Salesforce envy is real, but the gap isn't celebration (or the lack thereof). It's leverage. The Workday practitioner community already exists (it's just self-organized by necessity). The vendor is sending mixed signals. The deeper sting is structural: in our ecosystem, the architect and director roles go to consultants, not practitioners. We don't fix that by waiting for a jacket. We fix it by self-organizing harder and using the leverage we already have. Flex Credits proved it works.

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I'll be honest with you. I get the FOMO.

When I scroll past my Salesforce friends collecting Trailblazer badges, stacking certifications like Pokémon cards, wearing the rainbow jackets to Dreamforce, there's a part of me that thinks: "why don't we have any of that?"

We get Workday Pro. Which is a transactional cert program. Useful, marketable, but not exactly an identity. There's no jacket. No campfire. No "I'm a Workday-er" t-shirt I'm putting on my LinkedIn header.

The Nick Moores promotion was a signal that maybe (maybe) that's starting to shift (for those of you not in the know, Nick has been a developer advocate for Workday since 2021, and an integrations consultant before that. He's been quietly been building a presence for years. He knows his stuff).

Then, in the 2026 layoff round, they cut their community manager.

So the signals are confused. But honestly? That's not the part that matters.

The community already exists. The vendor just hasn't shown up (fully).

Look around. The RUGs. The Customer Sharing Movement. The Unsafe Harbor podcast. Workday Gold. HRIS Careers. And that's the tip of the iceberg. There's so much more good, solid content that practitioners are putting out there. The DMs that fly between practitioners every time a release note drops. The Slack channels nobody talks about publicly (I have a WhatsApp thread from Rising 2025 that's still alive - Go Social Squad ‘25!). The conference hallway conversations that are more useful than the keynotes (I once had a brilliant conversation about building a Slack integration with Workday two full years before Workday did in a Las Vegas elevator. Again, Eric, thank you. You’ve truly been a friend ever since).

The ecosystem is bottom-up by necessity. The vendor didn't build it. We did.

It's actually pretty good. Quieter than Trailblazers. Less manufactured. Fewer chants. The energy is operators talking to operators, not vendor-led PR cosplay. There's a kind of dignity to that.

But the gap is real. And it isn't really about jackets.

The real sting: who gets the title?

In our ecosystem, the "Solution Architect" and "Director HR Technology" roles disproportionately go to consultants who rotated through six tenants and built a personal brand on LinkedIn. Practitioners (the people who've actually lived in one tenant for eight years, who know where the bodies are buried, who've made the system survive three CHRO changes and a reorg) get a Workday Pro cert and a LinkedIn post when they get their certification.

That's a leverage gap.

Salesforce admins have an ecosystem that translates community participation into career mobility. Recruiter pings. Conference badges that mean something on a resume. A clear path from "I work in Salesforce" to "I architect Salesforce." That path exists for Workday consultants. It barely exists for Workday practitioners.

So when the Trailblazer FOMO hits, that's actually what we're feeling. Not the jackets. The economic ecosystem the jackets are downstream of.

The good news: we have more leverage than we think.

The Flex Credits walk-back proved it. Practitioners pushed back. Publicly and persistently. The vendor moved. Let's call it a market correction triggered by practitioner pressure.

The lesson is: when the practitioner community speaks with a coordinated voice, the vendor listens because they have to.

So here's the actual ask:

Stop waiting for the jacket. The jacket isn't coming, and frankly, after looking at the Trailblazer ecosystem up close, I'm not sure I want one.

What I want is the vendor to back the community that's already here. Sponsor the practitioner-led podcasts. Send Nick to RUG meetings. Promote practitioners into architect and director roles, not just consultants with implementation badges. Stop treating community as a marketing function and start treating it like a product input. And for the love of all things proper, BRING BACK BRAINSTORMS.

And until they do? Keep self-organizing. Show up to your RUG. Subscribe to the practitioner newsletters. Quote each other. Recommend each other for roles. Build the muscle the vendor hasn't built for us.

We don't need the jacket.

We need the leverage. And we already have it.

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P.S. I asked Justin if he wished his volleyball team had cooler uniforms. He said, "the team that wins the championship gets a banner at the club. The jerseys don't matter that much." Then he asked why grown-ups care about jackets. I didn't have a great answer.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | No Jacket Required

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.