The talent landscape is unceasingly being challenged by technological disruption, demographic change, shifting business models and the evolving nature of work. There is an immediate need to address the skill gap and boost reskilling and upskilling efforts in the current workforce and the new hires.

Owing to the changing business dynamics and long training periods, organizations need to start the skilling processes right from the time the new hires receive their joining offers. Onboarding and Pre-boarding programs can act as effective mediums to help new hires from campuses and lateral hires become job-ready by upskilling in new-age technologies or skills of the future. 

Continuing with our endeavor to provide actionable research to our community, People Matters in partnership with Simplilearn studied how Indian companies are approaching employee onboarding. This involved understanding the current state of the onboarding process in the organizations, the role of onboarding technology in accelerating skill development among new hires and how pre-boarding can fast-track the skill readiness of a new hire.

Here’s a look at the top 5 findings of this study: 

1. According to the results of the survey, the top three objectives that organizations want to achieve from their onboarding strategy include “orient new employees to the organization’s vision”, “familiarize employees to the culture of the organization”, and “foster a positive experience for new employees.”
   
   
2. The study also highlights that despite the massive gap in the demand and supply of the new digital skills to perform the required job; only 13 percent organizations are leveraging pre-boarding as a mean to train and upskill talent to make them productive and skill-ready from the Day 1 of their jobs.
   
   
3. Insights from the study indicate that while the organizations responded to focus equally on training new hires on culture and technical skills, however, the top practices included in the onboarding strategy included an orientation program (70 percent), an impeccable Day 1 experience (80 percent), and engagement activities with skill training and mentoring during pre-boarding (68 percent). This suggests that in most of the organizations, onboarding is limited to employees’ induction into the organization’s history, mission, and values.
   
   
4. To speed up the process of skill onboarding, organizations are not sticking to just one way of making candidates job ready. While Mentoring (49 percent) and Classroom training (40 percent) are popular mediums of delivering training, Online Training emerged popular among organizations to fast-track the skilling during pre-boarding and onboarding (50 percent). It was found that online mediums have been quite effective in speeding up the training processes and enhancing the learners’ engagement.
   
   
5. The overall adoption of technology solutions in onboarding is yet to reach critical mass in India. Currently, 24 percent of the organizations responded that they are utilizing a dedicated onboarding technology solution. One of the reasons for this resistance could be lack of a defined onboarding process or over-dependence on human resources to conduct the onboarding process.

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