Taking charge of my onboarding: my personal checklist
When I first join a company, I need some sort of structure. I feel like there’s an ocean of information, and I’m told to start rowing. It’s overwhelming to know where to start.
Thankfully, most companies have some sort of onboarding when you first join. It gives you some sort of foundation, maybe even helps you get the application setup on your machine. But often times I find company onboarding lacking guidance beyond the first couple of weeks.
To help me feel like I’m progressing, I’ve made my own personal onboarding checklist that I’ve used and tweaked over the past few companies I’ve worked at. I try to tick these items off during my first month of onboarding.
- Join all the fun and team related Slack channels
- Set up 1-1s with my entire team.
- Get to know them; topics include where are they based, how long have they been on the team, any surprises or challenges they’ve faced so far
- Set up a recurring 1-1 with my onboarding buddy (hopefully done earlier, and hopefully, I’m assigned one)
- Set up a recurring 1-1 with my manager (hopefully they do it)
- Read through the company career ladder, understand what’s required from me. Summarise these points and share it with my manager in our first 1-1.
- Understand what my manager thinks success looks like
- Set up the application locally, run it, and click around the interface.
- Have someone take me through the application. At a high level, happy path flow, understand how a user uses the application.
- Perform user actions myself, after the meeting. I wish to see what are the critical classes, any logging, and what the data looks like in the database.
- Get access to staging and production data. I want to see what real-world data looks like.
- Get access to any other tools required for my role (hopefully done during general company onboarding)
- Understand the coding workflow, either have someone take me through it or find some docs. What are the company conventions?
- Pair on a feature / bug
- Complete a feature / bug solo.
Hopefully, some of these tasks are included during onboarding. Is there anything I should add?