The Wild West

As a company’s first learning and development (L&D) hire, how can you effectively prepare to build a company’s onboarding program? And how can you familiarize yourself with your role if you’re hired in a team of one? Where do you even start?

These are normal questions for anyone entering a company as a team of one in L&D. Aside from these questions, you are met with what everyone has coined the “wild west.” Orientation might be a deck that human resources (HR) has pulled together from four different sources. Entire standard operating procedures (SOPs) might only exist in the mind of a man named Jason. Learner tracking, if it exists, is likely a spreadsheet titled “Training.”

These aspects might not be unique to being a team of one, as they are often seen in start-ups, company mergers or even in mature but shifting organizations. The biggest difference in these situations and being a brand new team of one, is that every single thing you create, channel you seek to forge and practice you desire to implement will be new to the entire company.

A Pioneer’s Mindset

There are two key aspects to the mindset needed to develop an L&D program from scratch. One of these, not surprisingly, is flexibility. While your new company will most likely accept you as a long awaited breath of fresh air, as the L&D professional you could find yourself being bombarded with priorities. Do you focus on becoming a subject matter expert (SME) or leveraging SMEs to build onboarding? Will you lead new hire classes or instead try to leverage an existing employee? Do you focus on knowledge base establishment or on fostering strategic relationships? Fulfilling their managers, the company’s, and each stakeholder’s needs at the same time can prove difficult for any professional, but is incredibly poignant for anyone coming in as the first L&D hire.

The second most important mindset to be aware of is being ready to prove things you have never had to prove before. Whether it’s the worth of an authoring tool, the need for a learning management system (LMS), or even the need for tracking beyond a spreadsheet, there are many battles to be had in the beginning. One of the most common battles of forming an L&D practice is documentation. Far too many companies fall prey to leaning on individuals as sources of truth versus taking the time to write things down. Many companies struggle with “tribal knowledge,” and getting busy operations personnel to take the time to document processes in detail can be both time-consuming and frustrating.

What to do first?

Every organization has different priorities, but these two principles are tried and true avenues to begin to moving toward establishing an inaugural training program. The first, as the cornerstone of all L&D, is building strategic alignment. While the first L&D person might be hired to build onboarding, what is inside of that onboarding program should come from the business needs and objectives. Ask questions, gather repots, request surveys and gain an understanding of what needs to be addressed and what the companies priorities and gaps are. Utilize tried and true tools, gap analyses, training process exercises, intake practices, to build a program with the end in mind.

Aside from strategic alignment, the next most important thing needed in this situation is relationship building. While leveraging your business acumen and playing corporate politics might be a piece of every professional’s journey, this is a pivotal skill to flex when you are the first L&D hire. Everyone at the company will relish you joining the company, but most are hesitant to give up the convenience of many of the processes that need to be changed.  An entire onboarding program might be built, and leadership could cherry pick what days they will allow their new hires to attend. An entire LMS worth of online training could simply be ignored without buy-in. Lean into building those relationships, leverage your own confidence, and broker whatever deals are needed as norms are built out and established. In the end, process implementation and mature training practices will come to fruition organically, but not without the support of your stakeholders.

Principles aside, your first concrete task might be to build an onboarding program. While there are plenty of articles and resources on the fundamentals of program building, here are a few specific things to keep in mind. This is your opportunity to become a company-specific subject matter expert. Whatever product or service your company makes or sells, there is a good chance that new hires are going to need to understand it. Rummage through wikis, seek out help, and ask questions, as becoming an expert in the company is more important as a team of one than it ever would be otherwise. This allows you to build an onboarding program that truly sets the foundation for role specific knowledge building.

No One is an Island

There are three major resources that anyone, even a team of one, has at their fingertips. The issue is, however, that they are each limited in their own ways.

The first resource: as mentioned above, is company materials. Find the fragments of documents, files and policies, and then familiarize yourself with everything that you can. In the absence of an onboarding program, you are going to have to get crafty with onboarding yourself. A good method is to reach out to SMEs directly within your organization. Meeting with them and expressing your desire to learn can benefit your role, but also forge the initial path of getting an internal network of support.

The second resource: leverage your outside network. That can be past coworkers, mentors, or communities of L&D professionals. Whether it’s to send sanity checks, seek advice, or simply vent, these resources are invaluable. The issue with this is that not everyone has the same resources, and even if someone does it is difficult to “bother” other busy professionals. Still, this is one of the best ways to still feel connected and move your program forward.

The third resource: utilizing technology. While you might not have the right authoring tools or LMS that a larger company might have, there are free resources, trials, and simpler programs that can be leveraged by anyone. The most important of these tools currently is artificial intelligence (AI). Make it a daily practice to run ideas through a generative AI model to do your own sanity checks, review and revise for editing, or even generate outlines or ideas. We are in a beautiful era of technology when it comes to AI, and often have a brilliant “coworker” sitting right at our fingertips. Here are some sample prompts to help you get started:

• I am going to paste an outline below of my basic onboarding structure, could you suggest five things that I might be missing?
• Could you draft an initial email to stakeholders, asking them to meet with me regarding a training gap analysis? Could you make sure the tone is kind and inviting?
• Could you proofread this one-pager and separately suggest five things that could be added as concrete examples?

Creating an effective L&D program from scratch as the sole L&D hire can be challenging, but it is also an exciting opportunity to shape the company’s learning culture. By focusing on strategic alignment and building strong relationships, you can lay a solid foundation for the onboarding process and future training initiatives. Leverage available resources, both internal and external, and utilize technology, especially AI, to support your efforts and drive success.