Student Employee & Intern Onboarding

Photo: Unsplash by KOBU Agency

Purpose

Improve onboarding process for student employees and interns to foster a higher level of confidence and autonomy for new hires, while streamlining manager involvement in the training process.

Process

BYU-Pathway Worldwide provides a unique work environment by regularly hiring student employees and interns to offer valuable hands-on experience while earning their degrees. The challenge with this model is a high turnover rate in these positions. I volunteered to evaluate and improve the onboarding process within a two week timeframe. Below are the steps I took to complete the project:

• Reviewed the current onboarding process.

• Conducted focus groups and individual interviews with current student employees and interns to share their feedback on the struggles or gaps they experienced as new hires.

• Assigned current student employees and interns to enhance the onboarding process by creating training resources and videos.

• Based on the feedback that was received, created a core onboarding template that was universal to each team in the communications department.

• After the core onboarding template was created, then created customized tasks tailored to the specific teams - content, design, web, project management, etc.

• Assessed the best approach for the organization of the onboarding process and determined it was best to categorize the tasks by day one, week one, and month one.

• Created onboarding blueprints in the project management software for the specific teams.

• Review and approval from the project manager and managers of the teams.

• Launched onboarding for the first new hires.

Perspective

I enjoyed every stage of this project! It was a highly collaborative effort to create solutions that will benefit all parties. Asking for feedback is important to enroll people in the vision or goal. When people feel valued, then they want to contribute to the solutions. We have seen a visible, positive outcome from the new hires that are going through this onboarding process. There’s enough training resources for the new hire to feel engaged during their first week and alleviate the time constraints for managers when a new hire is onboarded. The new hires are more confident to take on complex tasks and projects sooner in their employment. The onboarding process will need continual updates as the team evolves and new software is implemented, but those will be minor adjustments going forward.