Onboarding new employees: a learning journey for the first weeks

The challenge of the first weeks

A new employee gets more information in a short time than they can remember: systems, agreements, names, rules. Often in a day or week that consists mostly of presentations. What sticks is what is used straight away; the rest fades. At the same time you want to make someone productive and engaged quickly.

Building an onboarding learning journey

Divide onboarding into three layers:

1. Know where you are. Organisation, people, rules and systems, in short swipeslides of a few minutes. One idea per slide, with a question that checks it has landed.
2. Be able to do what you do. The first tasks and procedures, with exercises. For conversations (a customer conversation, an intake) a CrewMate conversation to practise safely.
3. Belong. The culture and the people: a timeline with cards, a chat for questions, a question to the community.

Assigning automatically with a workflow

A workflow can give access to a learning journey and assign slides to people. When a new employee is created, the right learning journey can be ready automatically. A CrewMate can help build the workflow. That way HR or the manager does not have to remember it and nobody falls behind.

See learning in the flow of work for more on tying learning to work processes.

A place to ask that is always there

New people do not always dare to ask. The learning journey has a chat, and a CrewMate of the learning journey answers questions, on the dashboard or by phone. That lowers the threshold: asking an AI feels less like disturbing someone. A good onboarding lets a CrewMate know the learning journey and refer people to humans where that fits.

Seeing how it goes

Progress is visible per learner and per step. The manager sees who is where and can hold a conversation at the right moment, with the learner’s AI report as a starting point. Open questions ("what is still unclear to you?") show where the onboarding itself needs improvement. See measuring learning.

An example of a first month

One possible structure. Week 1: know where you are. Short swipeslides about the organisation, the systems and the most important people, with a question per part and a question to the community ("what do you wish someone had told you on day one?"). Week 2: the first tasks, with exercises and a CrewMate conversation for the trickiest situation. Week 3: applying under guidance, with an assignment and a conversation with the manager. Week 4: looking back, with a short questionnaire and a personal report.

That way onboarding is not a pile of information on day one, but a route with an end, in which someone is always doing something.

People remain important

A learning journey does not replace the buddy or the manager. It relieves them. What is always the same, the learning journey and a CrewMate can answer. The human spends their time on what only a human can do: making someone feel welcome, explaining the unwritten rules and giving room for worries.

Use the learning journey’s timeline and chat to make colleagues visible and to connect the new employee with people outside their own team. See learning in the flow of work.

Different roles, branched routes

A new nurse, a new mechanic and a new adviser partly need the same onboarding and partly not. A learning journey with branches allows that: a common part for everyone (organisation, values, safety) and a part per role. That way the organisation does not have to maintain three learning journeys for what is the same.

Keep the common part short and alive: a short film from the director is fine, provided it is followed by a question. The role part is where the value is, because it is about the work the new employee does from week two.

Improving onboarding itself

Onboarding improves fastest with the opinion of whoever has just been through it. Close the learning journey with a short questionnaire: what was unclear, what did you miss, what would you have liked to know on day one? Combine that with the data: where did people get stuck, which questions often went wrong?

• Adjust the learning journey after each group, not once a year.
• Have a recently joined colleague read along with the new version.
• Keep track of how many questions are asked in the chat or to the CrewMate, and about what: that is a list of what is missing.

Checklist for the onboarding learning journey

• Is the goal of the first month clear: what should someone be able to do on day thirty?
• Is every learning moment shorter than ten minutes?
• Is there a place for questions and someone who answers?
• Does a workflow assign the learning journey automatically?
• Does the manager see the progress?
• Is there a look-back with the new employee after a month?

For teams with multiple languages

You translate a text with one click per field and reports can be multilingual. For international teams or employees with a different mother tongue that is the difference between "I have read it" and "I have understood it".

• Start with one language and expand based on who joins.
• Have a native speaker check the translation.
• Use images and video to reduce dependence on language.