Accepting a new job is an exciting and nervous time. As soon as your contract arrives and notice is handed in, the countdown to the next step of your career begins. As an employer, the period between accepting and beginning a job is a great opportunity to begin employee orientation and engage with new staff, channeling their early enthusiasm to ensure that it continues well after they officially join your company.
Learn more about the role your authoring tool can play in onboarding. Read:
"How an Authoring Tool Can Improve Your Onboarding ROI"What is pre-induction training?
Pre-induction training is getting in early. It’s about reaching out and engaging new joiners before their first day, helping them feel welcome, understand a little more and calm those first day nerves. From a business perspective, it has the potential to reduce speed to competence, lowering training costs, and helps to ease the first day face-to-face information overload.
How does it improve employee orientation?
Pre-induction training is important because it takes the pressure off teams and managers to induct staff themselves whether on the first day or beyond. New staff can be a drain on productivity for departments, especially if they arrive knowing nothing more than they did when they accepted the job. With other team members busy or otherwise engaged, inductees can have their high hopes slashed by bad first impressions of the company, which could lead to a churn in staff and increased cost of recruitment.
Mobile learning for pre-induction employee orientation
Pre-induction training can’t be a face-to-face intervention as the people you are trying to reach don’t yet work for you. Besides, face-to-face would only increase the cost of training and may leave some new starters in the dark, as it may not be possible for training to take place on their first day, leaving them to fend for themselves in the meantime.
Mobile learning makes it really easy to reach staff before their first day, allowing them to access welcome training and begin the employee orientation process on whatever devices they have at home. If the course is built in HTML5 you can be safe in the knowledge that a single course - which will work on an iMac, Nexus smartphone, Windows laptop, or iPad - can be delivered to all new starters, ensuring a standardized, up to date experience.
With cloud-based learning tools like Gomo, courses can be delivered by QR code or direct link, allowing courses to be accessed from welcome letters and emails, channeling staff toward welcome training while they are excited, engaged, and eager to learn more. Mobile learning means that new starters can begin to work through content at their own pace as their first day approaches. The beauty of mobile learning is that staff can bring their devices with them on their first few days if they would like, with training acting as a kind of performance support tool during the early stages of the employee orientation period.
What should be in your pre-induction training?
Pre-induction training is a great opportunity to introduce the values, brand, and locations of the business, including its history, key figures, and structure… all the general stuff that people are told the first time they walk into the building - the stuff that line managers have told staff thousands of times! Training should also tell new starters where they need to head on their first day, how to sign in, and all of those simple things that seem like such a big deal on your first day. Some basic skills training may also be useful to start the employee orientation journey early, but this may differ from industry to industry.
To get a feel of how mobile learning could bolster your employee orientation while wowing new staff that join your organization, click the link below to trial Gomo's eLearning software today and begin creating induction training that can be delivered to new staff long before they step foot in your offices.