Make Your Induction Legacy One of Learning

Inductions matter. Up to 1 in 3 people leave a new role within 90 days, and getting them wrong can be costly (up to £30,000 per person). Despite this, a staggering 88% of organisations don’t do inductions well.

Previously, we’ve shared tips on how to create moments that matter in your induction, how to design your induction as a clear and transparent journey, and how to use human-centered design to put people at the heart of your induction. For our penultimate induction hack, we’re looking at why skills should be an important focus of any induction.

We are experiencing accelerated change in the workplace: the rate at which we need to learn new skills to be effective in our roles is speeding up, and it’s only going to get faster.

According to the World Economic Forum, 42% of core skills are going to change from 2020 to 2022. In the digital space alone, we saw 2 years of transformation happen in just 2 months in 2020, according to Microsoft’s CEO.

As a result, we’re seeing an increasing demand for new skills: From January to April 2020, LinkedIn Learning reported a three-fold increase in users accessing their learning content, and Google announced “How do I…” was the most Googled term over lockdown.

The takeaway? It’s not what skills you know, it’s your ability to constantly reinvent yourself and be adaptable that really makes the difference.

Skills matter as they are an integral part of making your new hire successful. Your induction is a critical time to embed the key skills for success in your organisation – it’s during this liminal period that new joiners are more open to learning as they transition from their old role into their new.

To help capitalise on this liminal period, here are three tips to help embed a learning culture in your induction design:

1. Make your skills unique to YOU.

What are the top 3-5 soft skills that define YOUR organisation? Are you an organisation that prides itself on creativity, problem solving, or mindfulness? What is it that puts you above the rest?

2. Use your induction to build soft skills.

Think of all the inductions that people go on over the course of their lives. Your new joiners are going to take something away from each, so make sure they remember you as the place where they learned something that helped them drive their career forward. Focus on transferable soft skills that they’ll be able to take anywhere.

3. Teach them to love learning.

It’s not only about teaching your people the skills they need to thrive in your organisation, but also about helping them to become lifelong learners. Your new joiners will have to adapt continuously. More than that, they are going to have to unlearn too! Think of your brain as a wardrobe, and a skill as a new shirt – you can’t keep throwing shirts in your wardrobe, at some point you need a clear out to make room for the new. Teach your people to perform a skills audit regularly, and to let go of any skills that are no longer useful.