Shorten Learning Curve Of New Employee To Make Them Job-Ready

The general trend

Ideally when you hire new employees, that is the time, you start the on-boarding process. If you do not start the process immediately, then you will have to wait for the new employees to join your organization and then you will ask them to go through the induction program, and you organize several trainings to ensure that these employees are fully conversant with the organizational culture and the rules and regulations of the organization. This entire process can take anything between a couple of weeks to a couple of months and sometimes even a year. This is actually a financial loss to the organization, at the same time, people are not effectively utilized, as the newly joined employee is not able to deliver from day one.

In case of new employees there is a good amount of time form the time they finish their diploma/degree/certification till the time they are asked to join. Lot many organizations advantage this time and these new employees are required to go through the specific courses that would be required by them when they start performing. Engaging with these new employees even before they join the organization and start the on-boarding process has several advantages:

1. Brand loyalty: Engaging the new employees much before they join brings a brand loyalty as they start talking about the organization they are going to join much before actually joining the organization.
2. The time of the new employee is effectively utilized: Like as mentioned earlier, there is a good amount of time between the time they finish their formal education and the time they join, this time is productively utilized in preparing these new employees and making them job ready.
3. Shortening the learning curve: Since good amount of inputs have gone into the new employees even before joining and these people have moved ahead on the learning curve, so when they join the organization, they are prepared for the corporate world and ready to deliver.
4. Sense of security: With the Software, Retail and Services Industry doing majority of the hiring, many of the new employees are required to wait before they are called to join. During this period, these new employees are in a fix, whether they will ever be called or not. So, when these courses are assigned to these new employees, then there is a sense of security that since the organization is investing in us, so they will surely call us.
5. Social Status: In many cases, these new employees are first time workforce, so they have an eagerness to join and flaunt their professional life. When these new employees are doing courses, they socialize with their friends and family members and keep talking about these courses and how the organization is keeping them engaged.

Many organizations globally follow this, but still there are many that are yet to make a beginning.

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How do you reduce the onboarding time?

First and foremost, we need to identify your learning objectives. Once the learning objectives have been defined, various topics / curriculum is identified that the new employees must go through. We then pick and look at those topics that can be dealt online. At the same time we have to identify those topics necessary to be tackled in a classroom environment and those topics that would require a blended approach.

So, when we know what are the topics that have to be dealt online or through the blended learning approach, we can then choose the right methodology to deal with the topic.

The approach for these modules could be using:

1. Engaging and interactive elearning courses
2. Videos
3. Quizzes
4. Webinars
5. Infographics
6. Nuggets
7. Panel discussions
8. Discussion Forums
9. Assignments
10. Assessment, etc.

Based on the topic to be covered, we can use any of the above medium or a combination of one or more methodology to communicate. But it is always important to remember that learning is a two- way process. It is very important to capture and understand the learner’s response in order to make learning effective. Also, there should be a channel through which the learner can ask questions and clarify doubts that might arise during their learning.

Once the content has been converted to the eLearning course, it should then be hosted on a Learning Management System and the courses are assigned to the new employees.

How do we make the courses effective?

The next question is how effective these online courses are, that we assign to these youngsters. Just by merely allocating the courses to them does not help. We have to look at the learning effectiveness of these courses and see that the message is conveyed effectively across the learner. These learners are typically millennials who have the attention span of a goldfish. So if you create courses that are very long, or are not engaging or not interactive, then it would be more of a compliance. These new employees will just do these courses for the sake of doing, without much learning impact. Also, user experience has to be considered while choosing the right LMS where the courses will be administered.

Therefore, there are many things that have to be considered, if we would like to actually shorten the learning curve of these new employees.

Also, leader boards and gamified learning that creates learner engagement are an effective way to take learning to new heights.

Many organizations who have not yet embarked on this journey of early on-boarding, should leverage from it and initiate the measures to shorten the lead time for making these new employees job ready.