ERP Modernization Is the Biggest IT Project Your University Will Undertake This Decade — Here's the Team You Need
Hundreds of universities are currently mid-migration from legacy platforms — Ellucian Banner, PeopleSoft Campus Solutions, Ellucian Colleague — to cloud-native ERP systems like Workday Student, Oracle Cloud Campus, and Anthology. These projects take two to four years to complete, require specialized talent the institution has never needed before, and involve a constellation of roles that must work together simultaneously.
The challenge: most of this talent is only available in the market for defined windows. You need it for the duration of the migration. When the project closes, you do not need most of these roles permanently. This is precisely where higher education IT staffing through contract and project-based models becomes essential — and where generalist IT recruiters repeatedly fail institutions that need something more specialized.
Why Legacy ERP Migration Is a Staffing Emergency for Higher Education
The scale of the ERP transition underway in higher education is difficult to overstate. Banner, which has been the dominant SIS platform at U.S. universities for decades, is in an active cloud migration cycle across hundreds of campuses. PeopleSoft Campus Solutions — long the ERP backbone of large research universities — is facing Oracle cloud migration timelines driven by end-of-support deadlines.
These are not software upgrades. They are wholesale replacements of the foundational systems that process financial aid, manage student records, run payroll, handle procurement, and connect with every other institutional system. The data migration alone — student records going back 20 to 30 years, in messy legacy schemas — requires data engineering talent that most university IT shops do not have internally.
Delay is expensive. Every month that a migration runs past schedule on a legacy platform means continued maintenance costs, vendor support fees for systems past their prime, and institutional capacity tied up in workarounds rather than new capability.
The ERP Implementation Team You Actually Need
ERP Implementation Lead
The project quarterback. Owns the implementation methodology, manages vendor relationships (Workday, Oracle, Ellucian), coordinates with institutional workstreams, and escalates blockers to executive leadership. Must have completed at least one full implementation of the target platform — not just a module — in a higher education environment. This person understands the difference between Workday Student and Workday HCM, and why that matters.
This is the single hardest role to fill in higher education ERP staffing. Demand is high, supply is constrained, and the candidates who have done it before are typically engaged on other implementations. A staffing partner with an active pipeline of implementation leads — not just posted job responses — is essential.
Data Migration Architect
Responsible for the most technically complex and highest-risk element of any ERP migration: extracting decades of institutional data from legacy schemas, cleaning and transforming it, and loading it into a new data model without loss or corruption. For a university with 30 years of Banner data, this engagement can run 18 months.
The Data Migration Architect must understand both the legacy source system and the target platform data model. For Banner-to-Workday migrations, that means understanding Banner's STVMAJR and SORADDR tables alongside Workday's academic unit and address framework. There are not many professionals with this specific combination of experience.
Functional Analyst — Student, Finance, and HR Modules
Modern cloud ERPs are modular. A single large university implementation may involve Student (admissions, registration, financial aid, advising), Finance (GL, procurement, grants), and HR (payroll, benefits, position management) all running simultaneously. Each module requires a Functional Analyst who understands both the platform configuration and the institutional process it is replacing.
Functional Analysts who have worked in higher education — who understand the academic calendar's impact on financial aid processing, the IPEDS reporting requirements, or the grant accounting rules for sponsored research — are significantly more effective than those coming from corporate ERP backgrounds. This is a distinction most general IT recruiters cannot screen for. Specialized higher education IT staffing firms understand it immediately.
Integration Developer
Cloud ERPs do not replace all institutional systems — they connect to them. An integration developer builds and maintains the API connections between Workday Student (or Oracle Cloud) and the LMS, the housing management system, the parking system, the alumni CRM, the library system, and the dozens of other platforms that compose the modern campus technology stack.
Experience with Workday's Integration System Business Processes (ISBPs), Oracle Integration Cloud, or Boomi middleware is specific technical knowledge. Sourcing this talent through generic job postings rarely works. Firms doing IT staffing in Boston who specialize in higher education will have candidates in their pipeline with exactly this background.
Change Management Specialist
ERP implementations fail more often for change management reasons than technical ones. Faculty and staff who have used Banner or PeopleSoft for 20 years resist new workflows. Department administrators trained on institutional workarounds push back on standardized processes. Without dedicated change management — communications planning, training design, stakeholder engagement, resistance management — technical success does not translate to institutional adoption.
This role is often the last to be funded and the first to create a crisis when it is absent. A Change Management Specialist with higher education ERP experience is a project risk management investment.
Why Contract Staffing Is the Right Model for ERP Migration Teams
ERP implementations are time-bounded projects. You need an Implementation Lead for 30 months, not permanently. You need a Data Migration Architect for the duration of the data conversion phase. Contract staffing aligns cost with the project lifecycle — you are not paying permanent salaries for roles that will no longer be needed when go-live is complete.
The alternative — hiring all of these roles as full-time employees — creates a different problem: what do you do with a Workday Implementation Lead after the project closes? The role may not exist in your institutional structure. Contract higher education ERP staffing solves this cleanly.
Overture Partners has placed IT professionals across higher education ERP projects across the Northeast. We understand what these migrations require, and we maintain relationships with implementation specialists, data architects, and functional analysts who have done this work at peer institutions. If your ERP project is in flight or about to launch, we should be talking.
Your ERP migration timeline depends on the team behind it. Overture staffs higher education ERP staffing projects with talent that has been there before.