Starting a New Job: Onboarding and Your First 90 Days

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Everyone treats the probation period as a test of your skills. Your skills were tested at the interview — that is why you got the offer.

What is being assessed now is something else entirely: how much attention you cost.

The arithmetic nobody explains to you

For the first few weeks you spend other people’s time. Your manager’s, your neighbours’, whoever ends up explaining where things are kept and why this is done that way here. Every one of those minutes is a real cost carried by someone who also has their own work. The question quietly being answered in month one is not “is this person capable” but “is this still worth it”. Which leads somewhere counterintuitive: the person who wins is not the one who understood everything fastest. It is the one who started returning more than they consumed earliest — and that almost never happens through a spectacular result. It happens through a status update that arrives before it is requested, a question asked once instead of three times, and work that did not have to be checked twice.

What you get from planning it instead of surviving it

You arrive at the day-30 conversation with evidence rather than impressions. You know what you are measured on, because you asked for the job profile in week one instead of discovering the criteria at the review. You can name what a proper onboarding includes and ask for the parts you are missing — a mentor, a written scope, a checkpoint — which is a completely different conversation from “I am finding it hard”.

Where this comes from

I have designed onboarding systems inside fast-growing companies including Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank, and I have watched several hundred probation periods from the inside. Over 1.6 million people have enrolled in my courses and more than 150,000 professionals have been trained through them. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

How the course is built

One thing to flag before the outline: nine of the 37 lessons are recorded for the people who build onboarding rather than the people who go through it. That is deliberate. You cannot ask for something you do not know exists. Watch what a properly run programme contains and you will spot the three things missing from yours in about ten minutes — and you will be able to name them, which is the only version of that request that ever works.

You start with the journey itself: the environments that shape the experience, what happened before day one, preboarding, the first days, and the long middle. Then what a company owes a new joiner: the model, preboarding ten days out, the first day, the first 30 days, and the closing of probation. Then the framework — compliance, clarification, culture, connection — with checkpoints at day 1, 7, 30, 60 and 90. Then decoding the role: job profiles, competencies, and how those turn into your goals and indicators. Then the behaviour that decides the outcome: personal audit, being your own manager, managing up, reporting, overdelivery, motivation and communication. And finally mentoring, which is the single fastest accelerator available to you and the one most new joiners never ask for.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 37 lessons and every future update

• Active instructor support in the question and answer section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments you run on your actual job

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Why start now

The first weeks are the only period when asking basic questions costs you nothing, and that window closes quietly and early. Whatever you have not clarified by day thirty becomes something you are expected to already know. Enrol now and write your first-30-days plan tonight.

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