Onboarding that let people choose where to start

Orientation is the course nobody wants to sit through

UNSSC wanted an engaging new employee orientation, self-paced, gamified, for use around the world.

Everyone has taken one of these. The history, the structure, the charter, the achievements, the collaboration mechanisms. All of it genuinely matters and almost none of it survives contact with a new starter's first week.

That is the actual problem with onboarding, and it is not a content problem. The content is fine. The problem is that it arrives at the worst possible moment, when the person is also finding the building, meeting forty people and trying to look competent.

So we stopped calling them modules

Four missions. The learner picks which one to start.

That is a small change and it does more work than anything else in the build. A module list is a queue you are behind on. A set of missions is a choice you are making, and the first thing a new starter gets to control in a week where they control very little.

Every mission was gamified. Questions partway through and at the end. Learners were rated on their answers, and finishing a quiz earned a badge. The reward system was there to make it competitive, because people who compare scores talk to each other, and new starters talking to each other is the actual outcome onboarding is after.

Built in Articulate Storyline, on-brand, with a narrative running through rather than a list of facts, and an interface with instructions written to be understood by someone who has never seen it before and never will again.

What it had to cover

The history of the United Nations, including its charter and founding. Why it exists. What it has achieved. How it is structured and how the parts of it work together.

All of which is a lot for a first week, and is exactly why the order was handed to the learner.

What happened

Once it launched, UNSSC saw a sharp rise in participation and engagement. Every outcome they had set was met.

Their results showed that staff who came through the eLearning were better equipped on the history, the function, the structure and the purpose of the UN than those trained the traditional way. The competitive element did what it was supposed to: the questions were challenging, and people rose to them.

What we would tell someone in the same position

What we would tell someone rebuilding their onboarding

Give the learner the order. It costs nothing to build and it is the difference between a queue and a choice. Then look hard at what you are asking a new starter to absorb in week one, and ask which parts could wait until week six, when they have somewhere to put the information. Most onboarding is not too long. It is too early.