Onboarding 101 With Mike Hoyt

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You’ve decided to revamp your process for onboarding new hires, but where do you start? How do you create a thorough onboarding system that allows each new hire to become a happy, long-term employee?

I asked Mike Hoyt, IPC’s training advisor, to discuss the organization’s onboarding program, the hiring issues facing companies in the PCB space, and the best way to get aboard a new onboarding process.

Andy Shaughnessy: IPC has been involved in onboarding for some time now. Tell us about IPC’s onboarding program.

Mike Hoyt: Multiple companies within the electronics industry reached out to IPC for help regarding the training of their incoming, unskilled workforce. At that time, so much of the training focus was around IPC standards and certification, and there wasn’t much training available that taught the essentials that every operator, technician and engineer needed to know before they started working on the line.

So, with the help of training experts in the industry, IPC developed multiple online training courses for both operators and engineers that could be offered on day one of a new hire’s employment and could get them to proficiency faster. These training courses require no prior knowledge or experience.

So far, we have received excellent feedback from companies who onboard their new hires with our workforce training courses. We now hear that new hires get to proficiency faster than before and, in some cases, are cutting the time it takes to proficiency in half. We have also been told that students who complete this workforce training do much better when they get to certification to IPC standards.

Shaughnessy: When companies in our industry come to you for help with onboarding, what challenges are they typically asking for help with?

Hoyt: I can think of two challenges. First, there is concern about investing in the training of individuals who might not stick around. Unfortunately, not investing in the training of these people provides negative consequences as well. Recently, IPC created a subscription model with unlimited access to our onboarding courses and many other tracks. We have been told that this helps to mitigate the effects of potential turnover because you can train as many people as you like and not have to worry about dollars lost if someone leaves.

To read this entire conversation, which appeared in the April 2023 issue of PCB007 Magazine, click here.

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