New Employee Orientation and Cross Training in IT

This was published previously in this blog back in 2010. I'm re-publishing it for any benefit which others can find from it I'm happily and honorably retired now. 

Over the years I’ve done a great deal of bringing new employees up to speed and cross training others as a part of my responsibilities; I’ve also served as a team lead on jobs and trained others even before I entered IT. I’ve been seeing some common tendencies that happen when others in IT try to train new hires and colleagues. I think that understanding and dealing with these tendencies will help our IT organizations to bring new hires to consistency and productivity much more quickly and help to make sure that orientation and cross training really does deliver IT employees the information that that they need to perform their responsibilities.

Here are the tendencies I’ve seen, with their IT-appropriate acronyms:

• TMITQ: Too Much Information Too Quickly: The person doing the training has a motor-mouth delivery that throws out a lot of technical information all at once.

• TMT: Too Much Talking: The person doing the training indulges in a one sided lecture to the other employee as a captive audience.

• TMA: Too Many Assumptions: The person doing the training makes too many assumptions about what the other person already knows or doesn’t know or comes to know as a result of the training.

• NGP: New Guy (or Gal) Paranoia: The person doing the training has some kind of misgivings about the other person’s qualification or something else about the new person.

Here are my suggestions for anyone helping to bring a new person up to speed or doing any kind of cross training:

• Understand the purpose of orientation and training. It is to give the other person the information that he or she needs to do his or her job and the tasks that are a part of the job. It is not to try to impress a captive audience with a display of your knowledge.

• Get to know enough about the other person’s educational and work experience at the start of training so that you can tailor the training to the person’s level of understanding. Remember that it’s a great waste of time to belabor the basics with senior people who come in with a great deal of experience.

• Don’t make the training just technical, but include positive things about company culture, goals and objectives. Avoid any complaining about anything or anyone.

• Do not rush through the training, but pace the training to what is comfortable for the other person. Speak slowly and clearly enough so that you see the ‘wheels turning’ as the other person digests what is being communicated, and be ready to stop and clarify if you sense that the other person is getting confused.

• Give the other person a chance to take notes and ask questions. In fact, regularly stop, ask if there are any questions and provide the best answers that you can. It should be a regular understanding that there are no stupid questions in IT, but rather conscientious people trying to get the information they need to do their jobs.

• If possible, do the training on the other person’s computer, and allow the other person to use the mouse and keyboard as much as possible. If the training involves using a browser, give the other person a chance to bookmark sites.

• Provide the other person with as much application and infrastructure information, diagrams and documentation as necessary to do the job. It’s reasonable to give the other person the names of any relevant servers, websites or applications, and to write these down if they do not appear on any documentation.

• Repeat things if necessary, since repetition is often necessary to retain information. If someone asks a question that requires repetition of something that was previously discussed, don’t assume that the other person wasn’t paying attention. Rather, the other person may simply need to make connections with the different kinds of information that were provided earlier. Simply backtrack to what had been previously discussed, and take it forward to where the current focus of the training is.

• If the training includes modifying and checking in code or fixing bugs – and it should in a software development job – go through fairly simple examples at first, and allow the other person to see the source code and development environment.

• If there are internally developed utilities or libraries, or utilities and libraries which with the other is unfamiliar used in the software development process in your organization, provide any documentation, cheat sheets, support websites and anything else helpful to be able to use these utilities and libraries. Inexperience or unfamiliarity here does not mean that the other person does not have the qualifications, experience or capabilities to do the job; it usually means that the other person has worked in another environment or hasn’t had to use them.

• If the other person makes mistakes, provide correction and help to resolve any problems without humiliating the other person. Treat each one as a learning experience.

One of the biggest financial investments that IT organizations make is in hiring new employees and in bringing in contractors and consultants to provide additional skills and help shoulder the workload. Simply making sure that new employee orientation and cross training is effective is a great part of making sure that that invest