Best Practices for New Employee Training

By
Amy Vidor
Learning and Development Evangelist at Synthesia

Create engaging training videos in 160+ languages.

Imagine this. You've spent months recruiting for a crucial role. You've invested substantial resources in talent acquisition and interviewers' time to get the right candidate. You're convinced you've found the one. And they accept your offer.

The now-new hire joins your company. After a welcome Zoom call with their colleagues, they open their new laptop to find their calendar is full of meetings. There's already a backlog of work waiting for them, and no foreseeable time carved out for learning.

Six months later, they have their first performance review. Their manager scores them below expectations, noting they've been doing things their own way and not following best practices.

The only problem? Those best practices were never communicated. The new hire never received training from their manager, their peers, or anyone else. The next week, they handed in their notice. And from their perspective, they're not wrong to leave.

This is an all too common tale I see everywhere from startups in hypergrowth to major enterprises. If new hire training, and onboarding writ large, are viewed as a luxury that no one has time for, the result is underperformance, disengagement, and in some cases, attrition.

What is new employee training?

New employee training is any structured learning experience targeted at (you guessed it), new employees. I like to think about new employee or new hire training as three complementary components:

Foundations: the learning experiences focused on core knowledge, processes, and tools for the role.
Skill building: the learning experiences focused on building capacity in a role through practice and application.
Reinforcement: the feedback and coaching that keeps early learning from fading.

New employee training is part of onboarding. It's how new hires learn to perform their role consistently and to the company's standards.

Most often, training begins with orientation in the first day or week with the compliance and policy training everyone groans about, plus introductions to core tools and processes.

Why new employee training is important

The scenario I shared is a true story. It's what happens when organizations treat new employee training as a first week to-do list.

In a 2022 survey, 52% of new hires reported feeling undertrained after onboarding. Of those who felt undertrained, 80% planned to quit, compared to only 7% of those who felt well-trained.

The cost of replacing an employee who leaves within their first year sits between 50 and 200% of their annual salary, depending on seniority. That's before accounting for the productivity gap while the role was held by someone who was never set up to succeed.

These numbers will vary by organization, and I'd encourage you to run your own internal surveys to benchmark where you stand. How well you train new employees shapes how long they stay, how quickly they contribute, and whether they reach their potential in the role.

The good news is that this is almost entirely preventable. Let me show you how.

Best practices for new employee training

Whether you're a manager at a company without a formal onboarding program looking for guidance, or you're at a large enterprise looking to scale what already exists, here are five best practices for new employee training.

They blend formal training and on-the-job learning, and are grounded in the 5 C's onboarding framework: Compliance, Clarification, Confidence, Connection, and Culture.

Effective onboarding should meet compliance requirements (all the paperwork and box checking), clarify roles and expectations, build up a new hire's confidence, and help them make connections to their colleagues and the company culture.

1. Start with the foundations

I once ran a training called Set up for Success for new hires. The name says it all. The objective is straightforward: new hires should finish their first week knowing where to find important information and the tools they need to do their job.

This can be delivered in many different ways, but it should be centralized for quick reference (more on that in the next section). You want new hires to end their first week confident enough to take initiative and learn what "normal" looks like for their team.

How to get started:

Map out ownership for core content delivery (e.g., IT overview, Finance policies, Legal compliance).
Create an onboarding hub where new hires can reference all training materials and key information.
Determine how you will measure and iterate on these trainings, whether through Week 1 surveys or another evaluation method.

2. Teach the business

This is the biggest opportunity I see across organizations: teach new employees about the business. That means the company structure, the customer, how revenue works, how decisions get made, and how success is measured.

You may think an engineering IC doesn't need to know how your revenue works, but employees who understand how their work contributes to the business are more engaged.

How to get started:

Reach out to your sales team and see what material you can repurpose. They likely have a pitch deck or other materials, so you're not starting from scratch.
Connect with colleagues to document tacit knowledge: how decisions get made, how the company aligns on annual or quarterly KPIs or OKRs.
Design a training that is role agnostic. You can always tailor by function or role if you have the bandwidth later.
Set a clear success baseline: every new hire can explain how their work connects to a business KPI.

3. Develop skills that drive performance

Skill building works best once a new hire has the foundational knowledge to make sense of it. Without that context, they're learning steps without understanding why they matter.

If your organization has a skills framework or career ladder, use it to define what competency looks like at each stage. This will allow you to align skill building with the language used for performance reviews and career development.

How to get started:

Define the core responsibilities for the new hire in their first 30 days (check out the 30-60-90 plan below for more on this)
For each responsibility, explain what "good" or "done" looks like, as well as any common mistakes or risks
Make sure the first attempt is guided by a manager, peer, or SME so there's real-time feedback they can act on

4. Reinforce learning so it sticks

Remember earlier how I mentioned the new hire with a full calendar on day one? (Oh, you already forgot?) You don't need me to remind you that repetition is the only way to form a habit.

So build reinforcement into your new hire's onboarding plan. Figure out how to sustainably send nudges or practice opportunities.

How to get started:

Assess your tech stack to see what you have available to automate whatever reinforcement you design. That could be an LMS, a workflow automation platform, or an integration with your messaging platform. An agentic AI tool is the gold standard.
Design for spaced repetition: short, targeted nudges at increasing intervals rather than a single follow-up session. Offer retrieval practice where possible: a quick question or prompt that asks the new hire to recall something rather than re-read it. Focus on one concept at a time.
Check in with managers to observe changes in behavior. If something isn't working, cut it.

5. Run a structured buddy program

An onboarding buddy offers peer-to-peer learning and, as a bonus, takes some of the load off managers and L&D. Buddies are one of the best sources of tacit knowledge: they know the unwritten rules and shortcuts, and have the network to make connections to the right people.

But buddy programs only work when there are clear guidelines for all parties.

That includes role expectations (the buddy provides feedback but does not evaluate work) and a realistic time commitment, such as a 30-minute coffee in the first week followed by bi-weekly check-ins for the first three months.

How to get started:

Draft your guidelines for everyone, including the manager. The manager should be responsible for selecting the buddy (that includes asking the buddy, no volunteering here).
Provide resources to the buddy about their role and expectations. Do the same for the new hire.
Clarify responsibilities, such as who schedules the first meeting, and how to escalate if the buddy is taking too much time.

How to build a new employee training schedule

If you're curious about how to take these best practices and turn them into a training plan, I've got you covered.

You've likely seen the term "30-60-90 day plan" referring to the first three months in a new role. There's a lot written about these plans and plenty of examples out there, so instead I want to give you the steps to create one in less than 15 minutes.

A caveat: these plans work best as a collaborative effort between the new hire and their manager. I've seen them used as interview exercises or just dictated on day one, and neither sets anyone up for success.

A 30-60-90 is a clear path to success. If you're working in a region with a probationary period, it helps you articulate benchmarks and standards. Really, it is a forcing function to help your new hire prepare for a performance review, and for you to ensure they're aligned to the team and the company.

To get started, I recommend managers answer the following questions:

What are the core responsibilities for this role in the first 30 days?
What does "good" look like for each one, and what tends to go wrong?
What context, tools, or relationships does the new hire need before they can do the work?
How will you know they're on track at 30, 60, and 90 days?

Once you have the outline, work with your HR Business Partner or L&D team to map existing training to each phase. If that's not an option, find the job description for the role and upload it to an enterprise-approved LLM with this prompt.

LLM Prompt

You are helping me build a 30–60–90 day training plan for a new hire. Here is the job description: [PASTE JOB DESCRIPTION].

How to deliver new employee training

New employee training can be delivered live or asynchronously. The right format depends on the content and your context.

Live formats (in-person, virtual, or hybrid)

Workshops
Instructor-led sessions
Orientations

Async formats

eLearning modules
Videos
Infographics
Written documentation

If you're responsible for delivering training, you'll want to identify the best medium based on two factors: impact and scalability.

The case for AI video

That being said, allow me to make the case for incorporating AI video training into your onboarding program.

Years ago, my team was responsible for running onboarding, globally. One of our training sessions was delivered by a Benefits specialist. Every two weeks, they would host an hour-long, live session where they went through a 60+ slide deck (the benefits were good). The only problem? There was never any time for questions.

So we pivoted, and designed an eLearning course that people could go through at their own pace, and offered 30-minute office hours so people could ask the personal questions they were there for.

It was a good solution, but it could have been great with AI video. There were two outstanding problems with our shift to eLearning courses: first, they required a not inconsequential effort to update and maintain, and second, we had to create multiple versions to account for every nuance that impacted benefits, and then have them localized by a third party.

Here's how an AI video platform like Synthesia would have taken my solution from good to great:

Create a custom avatar of your subject matter expert so there's a consistent, recognizable face across every video, and when new hires show up to office hours, they already know who they're talking to
Update content in minutes by editing the script directly, without re-recording, re-shooting, or rebuilding the course from scratch
Collaborate with local experts by adding regional reviewers directly in the platform, so benefits content is accurate for every market before it goes live
Localize into 130+ languages with one click, without a third-party localization vendor or separate versioning process
Personalize at scale through the API by automatically customizing videos by name, language, and regional benefits data pulled from your HRIS (enterprise only)

If you are looking to save time and money by using a scalable format, I'd recommend trying out our AI video generator to see how easy it is.

How to measure new employee training

The last reminder I want to leave you with: evaluate your new hire training as you start to deliver it. Don't invest six months designing an elaborate training program without getting any feedback. You need to gather evidence along the way. The last thing you want is to find out six months in that your employees are part of the 80% ready to pack their bags.

As you get started, introduce a few repeatable surveys alongside specific milestones, like at the end of a new hire's first week. Ask new hires to use a Likert scale to respond to statements like "I know what to focus on this week" or "I have a clear sense of what success looks like over the next three months."

If you're a manager trying this out for the first time, keep it even simpler. After every training session, ask for one line of feedback: was it worth their time, and did they gain something valuable? If not, why?

If you have questions once you try this out, reach out on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear what you're learning.