How do you onboard new employees?How do you mentor new employees?
Situation:
My passion has always been teaching.
I enjoy teaching. In fact, I’ve considered being a professor when I retire.
At my current company, we didn’t have a methodical way to onboard new employees.
As a result, it took a long time for the new employees to start adding value to the company.
Problem:
The problem was that no technical person wanted to spend time onboarding a new employee.
The most onboarding happens at the HR level.
The technical people were not good at training.
Training requires skills and patients
Solution:
I realized that this is a problem.
So, I took the initiative to create a comprehensive onboarding program.
When a new employee joins, he/she would be required to complete this 5 week program.
I design the program in a way that will prepare the new employee to transition to real work easier.
In my program, the new employee starts at the basic level - such as uploading a static site from a repo to S3.
The head fake of this first project is that the employee would need to contact other people to get access to repos and accounts.
It’s a head fake because uploading a static website is a non-trivial task but getting the right access to required repos can be daunting.
The next project is building a monolith application, followed by microservices.
Each week, an experienced member of my team will also present to the new employee the tech stack that we use.
For example, my presentation was CI/CD and jenkins.
Someone else presented about infrastructure as code and terraform.
Impact:
As a result of this initiative, new members can add value sooner to our projects and transition to real work easily.
Lesson:
From this initiative, I have learnt that it is better to invest the time creating a comprehensive onboarding project rather than simply asking the new employee to shadow senior employees in the long run.
It’s methodical and we can work on a baseline to improve the program.