New to the Job? Here's How to Make a Splash in Your New Workplace!

In Airbus, while i was mentoring a batch of college graduates(new joiners) in frontend ecosystem, one of the mentees from the batch asked this question. It was good question and i thought that answer could be useful for several others as well.

Not every organisation has a plan for you from day 1.But they have deliveries planned, end result that is to be achieved, someone's responsibilty you need to shoulder on, But it is your responsibilty to come up with plan of action to prepare for the success. Here are some of the ideas that will help you

1. Contribute to Onboarding document or create one

A onboaring document is the serious of steps to help you understand the project, code base, team structure, organisation structure, key persons, key activity etc.

Onboarding docs is the place where you can have lot of conversations to start with the team. As a newest member of the team, you will have fresh insight. Don’t hesitate to ask for clarification. Often times, it shows some points for improvements, revisit the old priorities etc.. Also if you find them with obsolete data, make it point to upgrade them with the latest information.

2. Start small, but start

Try to fix a small bug or update a typo spelling mistakes in documentation in your project. This gives a insight in the about build process, build tool, access & setup restriction, technical systems and the process used in the product you are going to be part of, with less hassle.

3. Set clear goals and direction

Set goals for yourself & review them regularly with your senior or supervisor. This has 2 advantages, it gives a mutual feeling of progression and helps to do course correnction, which otherwise would be too late. Also, you will have clear idea of what success looks like in the role you are hired to do. Follow it up with a regular meeting, it helps both sides to progress which is acceptable by both side.

Often it gives a perception of proactiveness (it is indeed being proactive) and I have seen people more willing to help, all you have to do is ask.

I am intentionally vague about duration for the regular meetings, as YMMV [Your Mileage May Vary]

4. Improve onboarding for others

One another thing that you will mostly encounter is hearing abbrevations, slang, acronymns during the discussion that might make you wonder whether you are in right place!!.

jargons are special words used by a profession or group that are difficult for others to understand.

A kutti story, one of the organisation i joined was full of jargons, plus they were hiring in large numbers and you can see new faces everywhere. Evidently those faces were confused with all the jargons, including me ( i also joined recently ). I started adding them to a google sheet, along with others who are like me. we added all the jargons, abbrevations and slang for our own reference. The real value of it came when we ramped up hiring and there were plenty of people benefiting from it.

Now it was dead easy for them to look up for those words without feeling confused or lost and without troubling others for the expansion and explanation.

So work on that abbrevations. [PS: While writing doc, I made it point to not add abbrevations without expansion for the best of others :P]

Hopefully, that should help you right direction,

This post came to fruition more from observation of

• How i was onboarded by fellow developers in the team
• Feedback from new joiners i onboarded ( Fresh perspective )
• Difference between onboarding in person project and completely remote team

If you thought this was useful or you benefited from this, let me know, it would make me happy :)