The maturity of your team’s training program is critical to its long-term success because it directly correlates to how customers perceive IT services, overall customer satisfaction and employee retention.
Let’s talk through some approaches that can be used when onboarding a new IT Support professional to your team.
Review your training program
Before getting into specific areas of training, think through the following:
- Do you have a formal onboarding training program documented?
- What areas does your training cover?
- Who delivers/maintains the content?
- How much time do you allocate to it?
- How are you gauging the success of your program?
Start training early
A recent article from Indeed says a company spends about 33 hours training a new employee, I have often seen the onboarding approach rushed, unorganized and lacking detail due to a desire to get someone working as soon as possible.
Don’t train too fast because it can often lead to poor service quality, long-term performance issues, increased employee turnover and forces you to tie up time and resources spent by other staff (managers and leads) with increased coaching, ad-hoc guidance and ongoing analysis of the work being performed. It’s important to use training time at the beginning of someone’s tenure to have them:
- Learn about the company and its culture, build relationships and articulate the support structure they have around them.
- Trained on processes, policies and configurations of applicable supported tools/systems.
- Understand expectations for what to do when a non-documented inquiry comes.
- Provide insights into general onboarding challenges that employees may face.
Relying on someone’s industry knowledge, job-shadowing a more senior staff member and having a mature knowledgebase of internal documentation to reference are all important tools individually. They should be leveraged as part of a larger training program, but should not be thought of as an all-encompassing training solution.
Focus on engaging, informative content
Outside of the “what” you want to train to, how your training content is delivered and consumed is also important. Based on the size of your team, tools available and expected employee retention rates, different approaches may be required.
Larger organizations may have dedicated staff who solely focus on training as a primary responsibility. Smaller organizations may take senior staff and leverage them to deliver content. Ultimately, those training new hires on the team should be:
- Knowledgeable of the environment and work performed
- Outgoing and personable
- Have a true passion for helping others.
Leveraging technology such as your company’s Learning Management System (LMS) is also a way to scale and standardize your approach as it allows you to track and report on the delivery of your training programs. The LMS may also allow you to include mock scenarios and quizzes to reinforce crucial points and training progress.
Based on the frequency of your hiring, this can help save the time of those delivering the live training content, which can be utilized to create additional offerings, maintain content updates or focus on other deliverables. Based on your environment, think through whether your content delivery is best suited for self-paced, live delivery or a hybrid approach and the length of time that should be allocated to complete it.
Gauge the success
At the end of someone’s onboarding training, think through a validation process (ex: mock scenarios) to validate that someone is ready to be placed into a live production environment. This will give insights to whether your new employee grasps how your internal systems and processes work and if they can demonstrate the necessary soft-skills needed for the role.
Separately, try to capture feedback on the overall training curriculum for what worked well and potential areas of improvement. This feedback should be formally captured and used to continuously fine-tune your onboarding approach.
Finally, look to establish and communicate metrics for both new hires and those involved in the hiring and training process. This can help provide proper targets and gauge the operational effectiveness of the training being provided in comparison to past new hires and other existing staff.
With your initial onboarding training now completed, you can begin reviewing your team’s approach to creating medium to long-term development plans based on discussions with your new hires.