Onboarding is a cornerstone of helping new employees or those transitioning into new roles adapt within the organisation. Every employee undergoes onboarding, and many will, at some point in their career, have the opportunity to onboard new colleagues or those changing job roles. In expert organisations, onboarding plays a significant role, as essential knowledge and insights are often passed on within the organisation specifically through professional onboarding.
Onboarding can be divided into two main areas. The first area is basic onboarding, which includes orientation on workplace operations and rules, guidance on the use of common tools across all roles, and an overview of employment-related matters such as vacation policies and employee benefits.
The second area of onboarding is professional onboarding. This includes familiarising with job-specific tools and systems, learning how to use them, as well as orientation to the actual tasks of the role. In various expert organisations, the role of professional onboarding is significant and cannot be confined to a specific time period, rather learning and adaptation occur throughout an employee’s career. During long careers, employees participate in different projects that require adaptable and continuously developing expertise.
Mipro recognises the significant role that professional onboarding truly plays. Currently, professional onboarding relies on guidance and support provided by team leads, supervisors, and team members. Mentor-mentee learning will continue to be an important part of professional onboarding, but in this model, the success of onboarding is heavily influenced by the circumstances of the mentor and the entire team. In project-based work, workloads can fluctuate rapidly, and the arrival of new employees cannot always be scheduled during less busy periods when more time and resources would be available for onboarding.
Professional onboarding is now being developed further. The outcome of this work will be a training path composed of learning modules tailored to different job titles. Team leads and supervisors can select the most suitable modules for new or transitioning employees, ensuring they receive the essential initial knowledge for their roles. This approach, along with shared guidelines, will make professional onboarding smoother and more consistent, ensuring that every new employee receives the same foundational information on job responsibilities and tool usage.
Role-specific learning paths will be implemented on the MyInsight learning platform, which is part of Mipro’s MyAcademy family. MyAcademy is a set of trainings, coaching, webinars and online courses tailored to the needs of Mipro’s staff. MyAcademy ensures the realisation of Mipro’s strategy from the Talent perspective and increases the knowledge capital of the personnel. MyInsight provides a user-friendly platform for comprehensive online skills development.
author
Sonja Vuorisalmi
Design Engineer
I’m Sonja, and I work at Mipro in the user interface team as a design engineer. I’m also in my third year of studying electrical and automation engineering at South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences. Currently, I’m writing my thesis for Mipro on the topic of developing the professional onboarding process and designing training structures.
