Rebecca Yoder-Shetler was the only staff member on a residential behavioral health unit when two of her teenage clients started heading toward a fight. Everyone else in the room was beginning to get pulled in. A third girl walked up to her in the middle of it all and said: ‘Ms. Becky, I can tell you’re mad, but you’re smiling and that’s creeping me out.’
Rebecca hadn’t known she was smiling. She had been raised to mask her emotions so completely that she was doing it in the middle of a crisis without realizing it. That moment, and the honesty that followed it, is something she still draws on every day as a Workday program manager. The ability to stop performing calm and just tell the room what is true, that is a skill she did not learn in a Workday certification.
Her path to the Workday ecosystem is unlike most. She started as a second-grade teacher, moved into behavioral health working with at-risk teenagers, went back to school for psychology, got sidelined by a health crisis, built a nonprofit from scratch in central Kansas for nearly eight years, worked as a barista while recalibrating, and finally landed in tech only after a CIO she respected looked at her and said: your brain would be really good at this. She had no idea he was right.
What runs through every chapter of Rebecca’s career is a pattern she’s learned to recognize in herself. She engages deeply with something, masters it, and when the learning curve flattens, she starts to disengage. It happened in teaching. It happened in behavioral health. It happened in the nonprofit she poured seven-plus years into. Knowing this about herself has made her a better decision-maker. She has given herself a personal rule: never try something for less than three years, because there is almost always more to learn in the uncomfortable middle than it feels like in the moment.
The behavioral health chapter is the one that shaped her most deeply. Working with teenagers who had come from places where extreme honesty was sometimes all they had, she learned two things fast. One: she was genuinely good at de-escalating high-stakes situations by being present, honest, and calm. Two: she had significant work to do on her own emotional transparency. Both of those lessons travel. You can’t engage people productively when everyone is elevated and nobody feels safe. The same principle that applied to a unit of teenagers in crisis applies to a Workday implementation gone sideways.
When the Workday program manager role opened up at her company, Rebecca almost did not apply. She could already see exactly how underutilized their Workday instance was. She had a clear vision for what it could become. And she kept thinking: surely someone else would be better positioned to do this. It is a sentence a lot of people reading this have probably heard from their own inner voice at a critical moment.
Her CHRO interviewed her for an hour, pressing her on apparent contradictions in her answers, testing her thinking under pressure. She was convinced she was failing. At the end of the hour, he told her she was hired on the spot. He told her later that he had never done that in 30 years of his career. He told her to come back to that moment when things got hard. She has.
Her career advice, especially for women navigating the tech space, comes back to something Michelle Obama has said: when you finally get to the important table, you realize the people there are not as formidable as you imagined. Rebecca’s version of it is direct: if you see the gap, you are the one to fill it. Not someone else. You. Do it scared. Do it while doubting yourself. Build a cheering squad of mentors who know your story and can remind you of your own track record when you cannot see it clearly yourself. Keep a list of the hard things you have already gotten through, because you will forget them when you need them most.
Rebecca’s personal mantra is simple and she has tested it across every chapter of her career: nothing is unfigurable. She landed in Workday because it works the way her brain works. Everything is connected. You cannot pull one thread without affecting the whole web. That is also how she understands community, farming, relationships, and the behavioral health unit she once managed alone.
We ran long on the career story, and I’m glad we did. There’s a follow-up episode coming where Rebecca and I will dig into a specific aspect of Workday and how to get the most out of it. In the meantime, find her on LinkedIn and reach out if any of this landed. She loves connecting with other Workday customers who are figuring things out.
If you have ever wondered whether what you did before actually transfers, or if you are in the middle of a career moment that does not have an obvious next step, this one is worth your time.
Keith Bitikofer is a Workday coach and consultant who helps professionals navigate their careers in the Workday ecosystem. Listen to the Workday Gold podcast for more insights on career transitions and leadership development here
Want to learn more from the Workday ecosystem? Connect with Keith Bitikofer on LinkedIn for ongoing insights about Workday support and team management.