In the previous installments of this series of posts, we took a look at how TalentLMS fares with Compliance Training and Instructor-led Training. This time we’re having a look at using TalentLMS as an onboarding tool. Hop on!
Employee Onboarding 101
So what’s this onboarding thing and how does it fit with eLearning?
While onboarding is not about training in some particular skill, it is closely related to corporate training, as it involves giving new hires all the information they need to start being productive at their new job. That’s where the name comes from, too, as it simply refers to welcoming those new employees “on board” your company.
There are some standard items to include in an onboarding program, and some not so standard, that depend on your particular industry and business needs.
In general, your onboarding courses will need to have a welcoming message, a high-level description of the new hire’s roles and responsibilities, a short introduction to the company (its history, culture and values), any company or department-wide rules or guidelines that employees need to be aware of (customer service guidelines, professional ethics code, work harassment laws, etc.), and other similar items.
Depending on your industry, you might also want to inform your users of particular legal compliance requirements, like food storage, if you run a restaurant chain; safety rules for construction or factory workers, etc.
Other nice items to have, include career advancement paths, the company’s organizational hierarchy, job perks, and in general, any kind of frequently asked questions that new hires have.
What kind of businesses need an onboarding program?
Basically all business above a certain size. Sure, in a small shop you might be OK with just a meet and greet session, where some senior employee welcomes and fills in a new hire about what they will be doing and how.
For businesses with a larger number of employees though, especially ones with high workloads and pressing deadlines to meet, an online onboarding program makes sense for several reasons.
First, it spares your senior employees from having to onboard and “babysit” new hires. When time is of the essence, they will be much more valuable doing actual productive work.
Second, it helps you gather all your introductory material and makes it re-usable and formal, while you giving you total insight and control over what goes in it. This way you don’t get the phenomenon where some new hires hasn’t been told something important because the senior employee assigned to inform them forgot about it, or where new hires are told incomplete or false information.
Third, having your onboarding material in an online LMS means you can test your new hires to find out how well they absorbed it, which is especially important when it comes to company guidelines and compliance rules and regulations.
Last, but not least, not only can your new hires study the onboarding material from anywhere they are, but all of your employees can refer to the exact same information, any time they want. It will be up there, in your LMS platform. Oh, and with TalentLMS for iOS and Android, your learners will be able to access that info on the field too — even when offline.
Employee Onboarding with TalentLMS
As we already said, onboarding content is kind of, but not 100%, like regular training content.
Thankfully, the two share content creation, editing and management needs, which makes an eLearning platform like TalentLMS a great option for online employee onboarding training as well.
For writing your onboarding content, you just use the same, tried and true, content editing tools that TalentLMS provides for regular training courses, including rich widgets, embedded internet content, multimedia (video, audio) and auto-conversion of all kinds of office formats (PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, Excels, PDFs, etc.).
For some onboarding material you might not even have to write anything, as TalentLMS comes with an integrated content marketplace with hundreds of lessons that you can just buy and incorporate into your onboarding content (including compliance training material).
On top of this, you have all the usual TalentLMS gamification and testing machinery available, to help you increase learner engagement and test their progress in absorbing their onboarding material. And if you decide to combine onboarding with compliance training, then TalentLMS offers a flexible Certificate system so you can tag your employees upon successful completion.
Finally, if your business has several departments, facilities or international locations, you can use TalentLMS Branches to create independent onboarding programs (complete with their own customized and independently branded custom online portals) for every different unit in your company.
Conclusion
In this post, the third in our “many faces of eLearning” series, we had a look at corporate onboarding with TalentLMS. Stay tuned for our upcoming posts, where we’ll be examining further use cases for TalentLMS.
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