Cutting new hire onboarding time by 50%
The Problem
Onboarding Technical support onboarding at Turntide took eight weeks. The problem is that it was done almost entirely through lecture-based Zoom sessions. New hires were spending weeks watching and listening before ever touching the tools or working through a real problem. The format was very passive, which meant the actual learning didn't start until much later.
What I Did
I redesigned the program around action-based learning. I shifting the focus from listening to doing. Instead of Zoom lectures, new hires worked through hands-on troubleshooting exercises that put them directly inside the tools and products they'd be supporting. The goal was to compress the gap between training and real-world readiness by making the training itself feel as close to the real thing as possible. If someone was going to learn how to resolve an issue, they needed to actually resolve one, not watch someone else do it.
The Result
Onboarding dropped from eight weeks to four. And the shorter timeline didn't come at the cost of readiness. New hires were taking support calls and resolving issues independently within their first month. The format change didn't just save time and money. It produced staff who were more practically prepared, faster, because they'd been doing the work from day one.