L&D can be broken down into five pillars across two broad time periods. Each type of training has different goals and target personas. Therefore, how we build training should vary to best meet employees' needs and preferences. Beyond role or seniority, an employee's time in role or at the company impacts how to best meet their needs. These considerations are all important factors that shape the best way to design L&D programs. Next, let's break down the two time periods and five pillars so that we can determine the best way to build training to meet diverse employee needs.
Time Period 1: Onboarding
Onboarding, or the ramp period, is the time early in an employee's tenure where they get familiar with the company, the team, their responsibilities, and their goals.
While many would say onboarding officially begins on the employee's first day, I would argue that it begins during the interview process. Good interviewing is a two-way conversation. It's an opportunity for candidates to learn more about the company and how they may contribute to organizational goals. A solid interview experience that is fair and transparent creates a strong impression for candidates and shows them that the organization is serious about making good hires and treating employees well.
Some candidates will not proceed beyond the interview stage, either because they're deemed not a fit by the company or because they choose to opt out themselves. The worst outcome is when a company brings on someone who was sold the wrong job or doesn't have the skills or motivation to succeed in the role. Being clear and transparent during the interview and having organizational clarity mitigates the risk of poor hires.
Onboarding is the most critical training period for a new employee. Like starting an investment early so that it compounds interest over time, onboarding well compounds success for new hires. Effective onboarding leads to faster time to productivity and improves retention.
A 2007 study from the Wynhurst Group found that newly hired employees are 58% more likely to still be at the company three years later if they complete a structured onboarding process. Similarly, a study by Brandon Hall Group found that organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%.
These are not insignificant. Although these studies don't achieve causal inference between onboarding and retention or productivity, this type of correlation, intuitively, does signal that there is something here. Of course, humans and businesses are complex organisms and myriad factors can affect it -- but when the correlation is this strong, investing in onboarding is a solid hedge against churn and poor performance.
Why is it so critical to get onboarding right? It's because it's early in an employee's tenure. Think of it like investing in early childhood education. Children who start learning early tend to outperform students who start later in life. The https://highscope.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/perry-preschool-summary-40.pdf showed that children who received high-quality early education were 25% more likely to graduate high school and had 14% higher employment rates as adults. Like how early education helps boost cognitive development in children, providing early training when employees are most receptive to this will likely improve the odds of increased performance down the road.
Because onboarding happens early in an employee's tenure when they are learning the business and their place in it, it is the time to provide the most guidance and support through L&D efforts. New hires are most receptive to training at this stage, and the benefits of learning how to operate successfully in the work environment early will help them avoid mistakes and make meaningful contributions earlier.
Structured learning is only one piece of the puzzle. Onboarding also provides an opportunity to build shared connections and camaraderie among people in the organization. Think about some of your earliest friends you likely made: were they classmates in your primary school? Your roommates at university? As an adult, some of my closest professional relationships began with colleagues who started at the same time as me, with our friendships growing in no small part due to our time onboarding and learning together as we navigated our new working environment. As an organization, fostering shared experiences will provide common ground needed for people to build relationships: enriching their lives and improving their ability to function in the organization.
Onboarding training should be a mix of self-paced materials and live opportunities. Self-paced training is best suited for topics that are relatively static and repeatable, or in organizations where live training is too costly to coordinate. This approach ensures new hires have immediate access to materials they can review at their own pace, take notes on, and study further when needed. Content that doesn't change frequently or requires repeated reference is ideal for self-paced formats. Alternatively, think of things that are most broadly applicable to the widest number of people: this also gives you scale by building self-paced materials, whether that is video, e-learning, or a simple PDF to read.
Live training creates value through networking opportunities, practice sessions, and sharing the latest changes at the company. It provides a positive atmosphere, active learning opportunity, and energy that self-guided e-learning or videos cannot replicate. High performers develop strong, cross-functional networks, and building live training experiences helps bring not only new hires together but also connects them with tenured employees who exemplify company values and job success. These interactions foster stronger bonds across the organization and enable a greater level of shared understanding and experience, helping everyone move faster and more efficiently. Live sessions are particularly powerful when they build on what team members learn on their own in self-paced training. This means everyone in the room comes in with the same, shared understanding of what will be discussed, allowing facilitators to focus on the most high-value add parts of a live session: fostering interaction and active learning opportunities.
When does onboarding end? At what point do you need to shift away from training and focus on doing? Ideally, it's a continuous process. For example, estimate a new hire in their first week spends 90% of time in training and 10% on actual job responsibilities. In this context, training is not only formal learning -- but inclusive of shadowing and other tasks that don't yield a productive output beyond the employee developing skills, knowledge, and relationships. Over time, this balance should shift, likely inverting to 90% doing and 10% learning by around the three to six month mark pending the complexity of their role or the organization.
By this point, new hires will have completed necessary training and achieved their first "win," serving as a benchmark for long-term potential. Ensure new hires are on track with regular check-ins at 30/60/90-day periods. Use these touchpoints to provide feedback and keep new hires on a path to productivity.
Onboarding is not just a single touchpoint but a series of curated opportunities that help integrate new joiners into the environment. Companies that approach onboarding strategically create goodwill with new hires and achieve better outcomes in the long term, saving costs on re-hiring and preventing missed business opportunities that result from employees not knowing how to get things done effectively. While investing in thorough onboarding may seem expensive, the costs of employee churn and low performance will chip away at profit margins and growth rates in the long term.
An unspoken aspect of strong onboarding as well is the value it has in the marketplace for an employer brand. Companies that are known for having strong onboarding programs that help their teams succeed will attract more candidates looking for companies to invest in their growth and development. Beyond finding more willing applicants, good onboarding will help you pull from a broader pool of applicants.
Let's outline what onboarding can look like at a high level:
Interview Phase
The interview phase serves as a critical two-way evaluation process. During this time, the company shares detailed information about the role and organizational culture, while assessing the candidate's fit.
Candidates should leave interviews with a thorough understanding of job expectations, company values, and what success looks like in the role. Interviewers should document candidate strengths and potential growth areas, which can later inform a personalized onboarding plan if the candidate is hired. This phase lays the groundwork for all future onboarding activities and helps set appropriate expectations from the start.
Post-Offer, Pre-Start Date
After the candidate accepts the offer, focus on completing administrative tasks to ensure a smooth first day. Send welcome materials about the company's history, mission, and values, along with any compliance paperwork that can be completed in advance. Ensure all necessary technology is ordered, configured, and ready for use. If applicable, provide a budget for home office equipment and clear instructions for setup.
Meanwhile, managers should develop a structured calendar for the new hire's first few weeks, including training sessions, introductory meetings with key team members, and dedicated time for questions. The goal during this period is to eliminate administrative barriers so the new hire can focus on learning and integration from day one.
Managers should work with central L&D teams to build out standard onboarding calendars and task lists to ensure consistency across the organization and provide new hires with clear guidance and expectations.
Day 1
The first day should provide a warm welcome while helping the new hire navigate their physical and digital workspace. Begin with an informal welcome breakfast or team introduction to help the new hire feel connected from the start. Conduct a comprehensive office tour, covering essentials like meeting rooms, break areas, and emergency procedures. Ensure the new hire has functioning access to all necessary systems, tools, and communication platforms. Walk them through internal wikis, email systems, and collaboration tools they'll use daily. By the end of their first day, new hires should feel comfortable navigating their immediate environment and understand where to find information or seek help when needed. A successful first day prioritizes orientation and comfort over information overload. Make sure new hires feel like they made the right investment in their career by joining and that they have a clear direction for the next few months on where to focus.
Week 1
The first week focuses on building foundational knowledge about the company, its products, and the new hire's role. Balance formal training sessions with informal, introductory conversations with team members to provide context and build relationships. Schedule time for completing required compliance training while also introducing the company's mission, values, product offerings, and organizational structure. Begin integrating the new hire into regular team workflows and meetings as an observer to help them understand communication patterns and decision-making processes. Managers should check in daily to answer questions and adjust the onboarding pace as needed. The new hire should absorb as much context as possible without the pressure of delivering work products, allowing them to build a strong foundation for future contributions and start piecing together a map of the organization through building relationships internally.
Weeks 2-4
The following weeks transition to more role-specific training and observational learning. Implement formal certification programs if relevant to the role (such as sales methodology or technical/product certifications), complemented by structured shadowing of experienced team members. Rather than creating extensive formal training content, use real work being done by others as learning opportunities. Schedule targeted shadowing sessions that expose the new hire to different aspects of their role and introduce them to cross-functional partners. Assign an onboarding buddy who can provide day-to-day guidance and answer questions that might seem too minor for a manager.
During this period, the new hire should begin participating more actively in team discussions and may start taking on small, low-risk tasks that build confidence while providing practical experience.
Months 2-3
As the new hire gains confidence, they should begin contributing independently to meaningful work. Start with manageable projects that allow them to experience the end-to-end workflow of their role. This could include addressing "rainy day" items that the team hasn't been able to prioritize or improving internal documentation. These initial projects should be sufficiently challenging to build skills while having limited risk if mistakes occur.
Simultaneously, introduce the new hire to their long-term responsibilities, whether that's a sales territory, codebase, or program they will eventually manage. They should begin establishing relationships with key stakeholders and participating more actively in planning discussions. By the end of this period, conduct a formal check-in to assess progress, provide feedback, and adjust development plans as needed. New hires should start feeling comfortable making recommendations and taking initiative within their defined areas of responsibility during this period, as their onboarding buddy and manager start to step back, providing guidance but less direct day-to-day support.
Months 4-6
By this stage, the new hire should be successfully integrated into the company culture and delivering consistent value. The balance shifts dramatically, with formal training reduced to 10% or less of their time as most learning now happens through direct work experience. They should require significantly less supervision and demonstrate ownership of their primary responsibilities.
Regular one-on-ones with managers should focus less on orientation and more on performance coaching and career development. The new hire should be fully participating in team planning processes and building strong, independent relationships with stakeholders. At the six-month mark, conduct a comprehensive review to celebrate successes, identify remaining growth areas, and establish development goals for the coming year. This marks the transition from "new hire" to established team member, completing the formal onboarding process.
Throughout all phases, remain flexible and responsive to the new hire's individual needs and learning pace. Some may progress more quickly through certain stages, while others might benefit from additional support in specific areas. The goal is to create a supportive environment that builds confidence and competence while ensuring the new hire feels valued and set up for long-term success.
You, the reader, may see this and feel six months is too much grace period for a new hire to be fully ramped. Let's clear this up. There is a distinct difference between "able to deliver their work" and "fully ramped into the work environment".
While we expect new team members to deliver value early in their tenure, reaching full productivity can take six months. Everyone wants hires who hit the ground running, but we must balance high standards with realistic expectations. Navigating internal processes and thriving in a new environment is a gradual process. Consider six months as the point where optimization starts to occur, not first delivery. By then, team members should have independently delivered several valuable contributions and be positioned to take on increasingly strategic and complex work, getting better and better as they move past the lessons of their early days with the organization.
Time period 2: Ongoing
While onboarding centers on L&D, ongoing training must fit into employees' day-to-day work. Effective team members have little time to dedicate to tasks outside their core responsibilities. Sales people have quotas to hit, engineers have sprints to complete, and so forth. This makes training a harder sell than during onboarding.
Why do effective employees resist training? It starts with organizational values, leadership behavior, managerial priorities, and individuals not feeling empowered to invest in themselves—largely due to cultural pressure to "be productive" or knowing that time away from core responsibilities means making it up later. Therefore, ongoing training must be woven into daily work as a core component of operating culture. It must be easily digestible and seamless for participants.
Consider the garden metaphor: leadership tends to the organizational landscape. New plantings require significant attention and active investment, such as daily watering, protection, and monitoring. Once established, the garden needs a different kind of care: strategic pruning, seasonal fertilization, and occasional intervention when problems emerge. The gardener doesn't abandon mature plants but shifts to a more measured approach. L&D follows this progression: intensive care during onboarding evolves into thoughtful, periodic nurturing as employees develop capabilities and confidence.
Just as gardeners schedule seasonal assessments, employees benefit from regular learning interventions that refresh knowledge, update them on organizational developments, and cultivate leadership skills. These interventions must be precise and minimally disruptive. Context switching carries high cognitive costs, and employees naturally prioritize measured responsibilities. Even when positioned as a benefit, training must respect competing demands on attention and energy. L&D may always feel like an "extra" easily deprioritized when deadlines loom. Let's explore how to structure ongoing training to deliver maximum value with minimal disruption.
If gardening doesn't resonate, think of it like preparing your investment portfolio with various financial instruments, then more passively dollar cost averaging once the strategy is in place and making tweaks to rebalance as needed. Alternatively, and not to infantilize employees, think of how newborns require constant attention and monitoring before the parents can start to ease off and aren't as actively involved in the moment to moment care. The most intensive intervention that sets one on the right path is best done early.
Let's explore how to structure ongoing training to deliver maximum value with minimal disruption, transforming what could be perfunctory exercises into meaningful growth opportunities.
Knowledge Refresh
Consistent practice is important for retention. I am a guitar player and spent years in my youth building this skill. Every day for four years I picked up a guitar and played something. Years later, even while my regular practice has dwindled substantially as life's demands get in the way of my dreamy life as an idyllic bard, I can still pick up a guitar and play a few chords as though I last picked up a guitar yesterday. It is the consistency of practice that made this skill second nature to me.
An effective L&D program reinforces critical competencies, helping team members develop the muscle memory needed for teams to continue doing their jobs well. However, refresher training must be concise and targeted, avoiding the comprehensive approach used during onboarding. No one benefits from recycling the entire learning experience, especially if the learner knows something about a topic and the training doesn't acknowledge this.
For myself, I think back to how I learn. I studied business in university, investing three and a half years to taking class and writing papers on various topics. When I want to refresh myself on a topic I learned, I don't go back and enroll in another undergraduate degree. I instead find articles, watch YouTube, or if I want to make a slightly heavier investment, purchase a book on the topic to read in my downtime. This helps me refresh and build new knowledge, using the foundations from my younger years in more intensive study as a starting point. L&D programs should be similar -- you wouldn't send a new hire back to school every time they need to be reminded of what they learned at the start of their time at the organization.
For compliance training especially, consider offering assessment-first options. If an employee can demonstrate proficiency through a brief quiz, they've already accomplished the primary objective: confirming they understand ethical and regulatory requirements. This approach respects experienced employees' time while ensuring organizational compliance obligations are met.
Beyond compliance, other knowledge refreshers require thoughtful customization based on function, seniority, and prior performance.
Keeping Up to Date with the Latest Changes
In any quality organization, products evolve, policies shift, and even core values find new expressions as the company matures. Amid daily demands, employees often struggle to track these changes, defaulting to passive knowledge acquisition through informal networks rather than proactively investing time to learn by reading company-wide memos or participating in knowledge sharing sessions, whether that be a company all-hands meeting or a training.
While knowledge refreshers reinforce existing competencies, updates require a different approach, even though the principles remain consistent: simplicity, efficiency, and providing just enough context for employees to begin applying what they learned.
Product launches and feature updates should become woven into the organizational rhythm. These cannot be relegated to fleeting mentions in all-hands meetings or announcement emails; they require dedicated time to explore what's changing and why it matters.
Sales and customer success teams are the primary group that needs to not only know what the updates are, but how to take advantage of them to bring value to customers. Although this group needs the most product training to do their jobs well, they also are incentivized to engage with customers as often as possible. This creates a tension between perceived immediate obligations and future performance. L&D for this cohort thus needs to be short, simple, and drive immediate value for participants to opt in.
My experience with high-performing sales organizations reveals three consistent needs around product updates:
First, they need a deep understanding of the product and its value proposition, typically contextualized through the actual pitch materials they'll use with customers. Effective product training illuminates the value proposition, showcases key use cases, provides clear talking points, and demonstrates the product in action. This sets them up to mirror a quality pitch and demo upfront, gradually tailoring as they build confidence to suit both their own unique selling style and customer needs.
Second, they require insight into the customer perspective. This includes understanding which personas will find this offering compelling and why. The concerns of a CFO differ from those of a CTO or an end-user, necessitating tailored positioning for each stakeholder. Major launches that expand market reach demand more comprehensive persona education than incremental updates to existing offerings.
Third, knowledge of competition and industry landscape. To become trusted advisors, sales teams must understand their product's position, including strengths and competitive edges. Complete market awareness enables the balanced perspective that builds customer trust. Buyers trust experts who deeply understand both the problem and broader space, making conviction in the product more compelling. There is a reason we as buyers trust independent analysts, YouTube reviewers, or market research firms that provide a more holistic view and recommendation.
If product launch training covers these three areas concisely, sales teams will be well-prepared. They'll train themselves on pitch materials, so providing recorded walkthroughs, demonstrations, and overviews of customer and competitive landscapes helps them sell confidently. Regular office hours during launches enable direct engagement with product teams to discuss specific use cases beyond core materials. Gather feedback and revise training accordingly.
Job Training and Leadership Development
The final ongoing element addresses skill development beyond immediate job requirements. While company values and product knowledge form the foundation of most training, investing more broadly in the skills of the team is important. This investment prepares the organization for future challenges, demonstrates commitment to employee growth, and builds institutional capacity and loyalty.
Every employee wants to feel the organization is investing in their long-term potential beyond immediate productivity needs.
I'm sure you've seen this oft-repeated exchange posted on LinkedIn somewhere before:
"What if we invest in our people and they leave?" asks the cautious CFO, questioning the ROI of development investments.
"What if we don't, and they stay?" counters the CEO or other executive (the CFO is always portrayed as being stingy here).
This framing misses a fundamental truth: employees are far less likely to leave positive environments where they can grow, contribute meaningfully, and see a transparent path forward. Searching for a job can be a soul-crushing experience, especially while needing to maintain current responsibilities.
During the interview phase, I often tell candidates that once you're in the room, it is your job to lose. If the candidate is getting an interview, it means the company thinks that they are a likely fit -- but are willing to walk away. The flip side is true once they're hired -- they then become the company's asset to lose. Once a company identifies and invests in talent, they need to do their best to keep them.
Investing in employee skill development can yield many rewards: enhanced team capabilities, improved retention, and preserved institutional knowledge. The cost of backfilling positions and ramping new hires will exceed preventative investments in current talent. "An ounce of prevention is cheaper than a pound of cure." Put more directly (and less eloquently), an ounce of L&D and performance management is worth a pound of recruiting. It's better to make your existing staff better than to fire and find their replacements (at least if the person in role is a good fit).
What should this ongoing investment look like?
Both job training and leadership development benefit from live, in-person sessions. For sales teams, this might mean structured "pitch-offs" or roleplay scenarios where colleagues help each other refine customer conversations. Analyzing call recordings in small groups can scale learning across the organization. Engineering teams might benefit from hackathon-style events addressing business challenges with innovative solutions, or conference attendance that exposes them to industry trends and emerging technologies. These types of carve outs that bring the team together to work together in new ways and learn from each other are incredibly valuable, even if there isn't always a formal learning agenda or outcome.
The common thread is peer-to-peer learning. This creates structured opportunities for teams to elevate together. Daily operations rarely facilitate these exchanges, but intentional investment leads to two strong outcomes: immediate skill development during the session, plus enhanced informal learning networks afterward. Colleagues who know each other are far more likely to share knowledge organically than those who remain strangers. An HBR study notes that high performers all ahve strong internal networks, while another study stated that the most significant predictor of employee retention was having a close friend at work. While these can develop organically, organizations should facilitate this as much as possible. L&D teams can actively cultivate these networks through thoughtfully designed, collaborative experiences. Again, shared experiences create strong relationships.
Professional development and leadership training follow similar principles but warrant additional formality and prestige. Reserving these opportunities for high performers and leadership candidates creates dual benefits: meaningful development for participants and aspirational incentives for others. Like the popular "president's club" concept for salespeople who exceed quota, selective leadership training becomes something employees strive toward, becoming important social proof that helps validate their experience, skills, and performance. While we should not measure our self-worth by these accomplishments, recognition goes a long way in helping people feel valued -- encouraging them to stay.
Effective leadership curricula address the universal challenges of organizational growth: conflict resolution, team management, cross-functional collaboration, and strategic thinking. Begin with the competencies required at executive levels, then break these into progressive development components aligned with company values and culture. Weaving in the core leadership skills with company values will ensure the organization doesn't learn generic leadership platitudes, but actually learns how to effectively lead in the context of the organization.
While annual refreshers and new launches should be as short and seamless as possible, leadership training is different. Making leadership and professional development training too short and insignificant sends a signal to employees: that the organization does not care about their growth or career development.
With these time periods in mind, let's summarize: how should we approach each type of training in different time periods?
Onboarding
This should be the first thing new hires learn when they come on board. As we discussed earlier, onboarding begins during the interview phase. The experience that prospective candidates have with the recruiting team, through the interviews, to the offer letter. Company cultures and values should be woven through this process to paint a clear picture to the candidate of what their experience will be like, helping them envision their life at the organization.
Once they are onboard, formal training can begin. While the interview is a bit like a probationary testing period, similar to the first few coffee dates before formalizing a romantic partnership, the real investment begins when they sign the offer and step in as a paid employee.
Organizations need to nail the first day experience. Ideally, start dates are staggered to bring people onboard on specific dates, creating cohorts of new hires. This not only reduces the time spent facilitating onboarding sessions but also creates a bonus effect for new hires: a pre-built network for them to learn with. Shared experiences are powerful.
Company and culture training should be conducted live. The first day experience should be universally applicable to all employees. It is critical not only to ensure that every hire learns the same things about the company in the same way, but also to consider what it signals to the organization: if a new C-suite leader is in the same room as a new intern, it sends a powerful message that everyone is committed to the same mission and shares the same values. This helps create cohesion across the team and fosters connection in unlikely places.
Here's a sample of a practical schedule for a first day onboarding experience:
9:00 AM: Arrival and informal gathering with breakfast, allowing time for casual interaction.
9:30 AM: Formal session begins, led by senior leadership and L&D representatives. Cover the day's agenda, facilitate introductions, and set expectations for initial onboarding and beyond. Involve active participation rather than passive listening. A brief introduction including "name, title, background, and fun fact" eases tension. For fun fact, go for something safe: favorite food or dream travel destination are both fairly safe choices. You want facts that bring people together, not push people apart.
10:00 AM: Focus on a brief history of the organization. This part should have a bit of the "ra-ra" to get people excited about the company and feel like they will be part of its story. This history should highlight the customer problem and what the organization has done to solve this over time, speaking to how the company has grown and solved organizational problems. People love to see stats: revenue, products launched, countries operating in, headcount, and so forth. This type of history should include these data points.
10:30 AM: Explain how company culture and values drive success. Share how values were developed and what they mean in practice. This teaches "rules of the game" for effectiveness, with concrete examples like hiring processes and decision-making, and how that weaves into the company's values and mission.
11:00 AM: Take a short break, letting people use the restroom, stretch their legs, etc.
11:15 AM: Organizational design overview. Present each department's function, size, and current projects without excessive detail. Field questions about team dynamics. The goal here is so they have a map of the organization and can take a top-down view, giving them a stronger sense of how the system works and enable them to think like an owner.
11:45 AM: IT setup. Review policies, distribute equipment, ensure access to core systems, and guide software installations. Explain available tools and how to request additional resources.
12:30 PM: Lunch with tenured employees for networking and relationship building. Afterward, new hires meet their teams to begin role-specific onboarding.
This outline emphasizes company goals, operational methods, and first-week expectations. Implementation varies by company size, but whether it's the first or hundredth hire, the core remains: establish context, explain company thinking, and provide essential tools. The first day leaves a lasting impression. Make it strong to reassure new hires they made the right decision.
After this introduction, culture training should integrate with daily operations. All employees should experience customer interactions and see how products are built and deployed. This could include shadowing sales calls, spending time in production facilities, or observing product planning. Time should be dedicated to building business context so employees can approach their roles confidently.
Strong hires have requisite skills but need business context to make effective recommendations. A structured program providing this overview helps them develop perspective on their potential contributions. Regular shadowing with an onboarding buddy helps new hires see how it all comes together in action, taking what's learned on their own and in the classroom in practice.
The stage of your company will determine the most valuable use of this learning time. Regardless of size and scale, find appropriate ways to introduce your new hires to core customer interactions to help them understand how the business works and where there are opportunities for improvement. This creates empathy between corporate hires and operational, front-line teams, and helps facilitate stronger cross-organizational connections.
This isn't a radical concept -- it's something top companies already do. Zappos, the online footwear retailer, is famous for having all new hires work in customer support for their first month, then offering a buyout if the team member decides it's not for them. Airbnb corporate hires are encouraged to experience the guest journey by booking and staying at an Airbnb while also shadowing customer support representatives to understand common user issues. While some hiring managers may resist having their new hires invest time here, it's important that every hire understands how the business works before focusing on their specific function. This critical empathy-building period not only connects employees with frontline workers but also creates a shared experience. All employees will understand the company's core customers and problems, enabling better discussion and decision making. If individuals at the upper levels of an organization lack context about how the business actually works, they cannot effectively make decisions. First-hand experience helps build this shared understanding and enables solutions uniquely suited for the company. This is especially critical for new senior hires who might want to apply the playbook from their previous organization without considering the unique context of the business. A small investment upfront, even as little as a week, will help the company avoid poor decisions downstream.
Ongoing: In most cases, reinforcing company culture and values should not happen in isolation. While introducing company values and operations in a day-one onboarding session builds the foundation, ongoing training opportunities should focus on how these appear in functional tasks, such as interview training and leadership development. More on these below.
Pillar 2: Role-specific training
Onboarding: Training by role will vary in this period. However, the general principles of role-specific training should be the same across functions. Size and scale will determine the formality this takes. In general, roles that have repeatable motions like sales and customer success will generally be the first to have dedicated role-specific training. These are usually functions that hire cohorts and require the most company-specific job training to do their functions well.
In the early days of a company, there isn't as much time to dedicate to ramp and the sales and customer motions are more fluid. Therefore, it's generally enough to give the new hire time to shadow and reverse shadow with a tenured onboarding buddy that can help them navigate. Opportunities at this stage are not as plentiful or repeatable, so there is nuance in how to navigate it. Ensuring they get regular exposure to people doing the job well and getting on the job feedback is critical for the early stages of learning the job. Regardless, early stage companies should not be hiring people who need formal training to do well.
As companies mature and processes, sales motions, and pitches become more streamlined and repeatable, there also creates a greater opportunity to formalize role-training. For sales and customer success teams, there is an opportunity to offer a mix of training opportunities beyond shadowing, including role plays, mock pitches and product demos, and so forth. This type of training should culminate in some sort of certification exercise where the newbie is conducting a mock pitch or discovery with their leadership to validate if they are ready to start operating independently. This is critical as its important to feel confident that the new hire is equipped with the knowledge and skills to do their job effectively. Sending a new hire without validating this into the wild will be good learning for them, but it comes at a greater cost of potential missed opportunities and a decline in company reputation if sales and customer success team members are not adequately knowledgeable to do their jobs alone. Even if they achieve a certification or pass a mock pitch exercise, they should still receive support from an onboarding buddy or manager to guide them through until there is significant confidence they can operate alone.
Ongoing: Ongoing role training should develop skills, contextualize industry changes, and update processes to meet business needs.
Content varies by change type. Helping sales teams address new customer segments requires live sessions on business changes, customer needs, and pitch adjustments. Shifting responsibilities between teams requires education about rationale, revised roles, and benefits.
This may require more targeted skill training if roles are fundamentally shifting. For example, when I was working as a learning experience designer at Amazon, we could not get requested headcount to support content builds in e-learning tools, so we had to be trained to do this job effectively to meet the quality bar we set. The team knew why the change was made and the benefit of developing the new skill, as well as the time and resources needed to ramp up in this space that previously was not part of the job description.
For roles with variable compensation, training on plans shapes behavior. Sales and customer success teams need to understand incentives for different deal types and product sales to align with leadership priorities.
Pillar 3: Product training
Onboarding: Product training will be staggered pending the role and job scope of the individual. At minimum, all employees should get a "product 101" type of training. This can be a self-paced experience, as the goal is for the team to be aware of the product, remember its core features and use cases, and understand how it solves customer problems.
Pending the type of product you're dealing with, how you teach it will vary. For example, if you're working at a financial services company, use short videos detailing the company's offerings and how it stands out from competitors -- what is unique about the company's investment philosophy or core offering? Conversely, other products that can be "used", like an email marketing platform or consumer app should involve more tangible components, such as product demos or basic exercises to help the team build familiarity with how to use the product and how customers interact with it each day.
A short series for all employees may look like:
- Product Introduction - offerings and significance
- Key Customers - problems and motivations
- Industry Context - competitive positioning
- Success Metrics - customer and company outcomes
- Demonstration - videos of product in action
I'd probably make a series like this take ninety minutes to four hours at max. The goal here is to give people enough to understand the products customers use to contextualize their own role in the organization. For employees, especially those not involved in selling, servicing, or marketing the product, this may be enough to get them moving.
However, for the aforementioned groups that need to live and breathe the product, more product education upfront is necessary.
My view is that the best salespeople, marketers, and engineers are all intimately familiar with their product. They know the ins and outs of how it works -- warts and all -- and can speak to its benefits and shortcomings with confidence. This expertise is not only important for them to do their jobs well, but in having the same shared background and knowledge as their peers.
This helps foster shared experiences, but also enables faster conversation and consensus building on the truth. If customer success and product teams both know (and most importantly, agree upon!) the problems with the product, they can move faster in discussion and more quickly align on customer pain points and priorities. If the teams have a different level of understanding of what the user experiences and how things work when rubber hits the road, it creates misalignment. One side may think problem A is the most critical, debilitating issue, while the other downplays its risk or doesn't fully understand why this is an issue. The gap may come from a lack of shared understanding and product knowledge.
For roles that work directly on and with the products being sold, additional training upfront is needed. This should go a level deeper than the above. I recommend a more advanced training, packaged as a "certification" to provide not only more in-depth knowledge and practice, but an opportunity to get the social proof that their knowledge is validated by the company's leadership, indicating they are ready to use the product in the field.
When I worked at a technology company, I worked with our customer success team to build a series of product demonstration videos that detailed how to use the product and where to navigate to get things done. The next step was a series of prompts for the user to do to build their own knowledge and practice what they learn. This may start small, like figuring out how to upload an image into the system or download a report, but progressively ramp up in complexity by combining multiple steps. The result was after successfully "passing" each of the prompts, the employee could basically do anything they wanted to do in the tool that a customer needed. The company focused on email marketing creative, which became an important skill for folks throughout the company to use -- making their own creative templates for internal comms and better identifying opportunities to improve workflows for customers.
Ultimately, for roles that require product knowledge to be successful in their day-to-day, you need to create an active learning experience to help them build and demonstrate this proficiency. This may be a series of exercises, the ability to run through a mock demonstration, or successfully troubleshoot a customer issue. While passive information consumption may be enough to get started, there needs to be a high effort, active component to reinforce what's learned and build the muscle in a safe environment. The more the product training reflects how the team will actually need to use it in their day-to-day, the more effective the training will be. Getting this right upfront sets up the team for success in their role, helping them approach with confidence.
In most cases, I would assume product knowledge is where the average new hire is most deficient -- they may have performed in a similar function at a previous employer, but they likely do not know the ins and outs of the product and the specific customer problems.
Ongoing: Products, especially tech products, often undergo frequent change. It's important for the team to stay up to date with these types of changes, but can be increasingly difficult as companies mature and the flurry of updates ramps up. In addition, unlike the onboarding period, internal users of products won't want to dedicate time to formal exercises and practice -- they will want to get the latest info, see how it works, and quickly weave it into their banks of knowledge, getting back to their job as quickly as possible.
Ongoing product training should therefore focus on awareness, linking to resources, and summarizing key changes. This may not need to be a formal training module, but rather a wiki, a few short demonstrations, and a summarized list of key changes and any rationale or business metrics that describe it in greater depth.
The main challenge is not deciding what to train on, but rather getting it in front of busy teams. Find ways to incentivize the team to complete the training and demonstrate their newfound knowledge. If organizational culture promotes continuous learning, then employees will be more inclined to complete training.
Pillar 4: Leadership development training
Onboarding: During onboarding, leadership development should focus on equipping new managers with the skills to function effectively in their specific organizational context. Since management expectations vary between companies, training should address both team leadership fundamentals and company-specific processes.
New leaders need early exposure to internal functions like recruiting, training, and performance management. They should understand not just the mechanics of these processes, but the underlying philosophy and how to implement them effectively.
Assuming the organization screens for functional expertise during hiring, early leadership development investments should focus less on technical skills and more on applying those skills within the unique environment, setting clear expectations for managerial responsibilities, ensuring fair team treatment, and mastering company-specific leadership processes. When teaching these processes, it is important to connect them explicitly to the company's culture and values. Framing leadership as a critical responsibility emphasizes the importance of fair and consistent execution.
The Confucian concept of the five key relationships (五倫, wǔlún) serves as a model for organizational harmony. This philosophy emphasizes that effective relationships require both parties to understand and fulfill their roles. Similarly, clearly defining manager and team member expectations creates accountability and supports organizational success.
The onboarding period should establish leadership expectations and provide resources for ongoing development. Teach the core concepts that don't change in a self-paced course, while using live training or sessions to walk through specific scenarios that test the cohesion of the manager-team member relationship. The live sessions should also create a cohort of recently hired managers across the organization to help foster camaraderie and share best practices.
Ongoing: Ongoing leadership development training should focus on building new skills and growing leaders: both people currently in positions of leadership and cultivating skills of new managers.
I generally recommend having a fairly even split of experienced managers hired from outside and new managers that are homegrown. This mix ensures that organizations have a healthy mix of outside perspective and organizational fluency, allowing both sides to grow and learn from each other.
Ongoing leadership development training should focus on continuing to identify and cultivate leaders, reinforcing what is learned through the onboarding process, and helping leaders navigate new challenges that emerge as organizations change and grow in size.
Pillar 5: Compliance training
Onboarding: Compliance training should get knocked out as quickly as possible. Know the laws and legal requirements for training in your country, state, and/or municipality, and ensure that new hires get through them quickly. These should be standard, self-paced offerings that can be completed during a new hire's first week or so.
Ongoing: Ongoing compliance training should be for new compliance requirements and annual refreshers on areas the new hire previously completed. As mentioned earlier, ongoing training should lead with assessments first to reduce time spent in training.
Putting it all together
There are a lot of ways you can create training. Much will vary on the nature of the learner, the organization, their customers, and what is needed from each. The above should provide thought starters for you as you evaluate the right way to deliver effective L&D programs.