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Kirsten AlburgLearning Experience Designer
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Corporate L&D

Employee Onboarding Experience

A guided first-week experience for new corporate hires

Format
Slide-based interactive course
Audience
New corporate employees
Length
25–30 minutes
Sections
7

Portfolio demonstration. This course was designed and built by Kirsten Alburg to show instructional design capability. It was not created for a client and is not built in Articulate.

Slide-based interactive course

Employee Onboarding Experience

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Section 1 of 7 — Welcome aboard14% complete

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Welcome aboard

A new employee at a desk being welcomed by a colleague leaning in to help
Week one is rarely about policy. It is about whether someone feels able to ask the next question out loud.

Read the room on day one

This is a real first morning. Click directly on the photograph wherever you see something that either helps or quietly hurts a new hire's confidence. Wrong guesses break your streak.

Find 4 details that shape whether someone feels able to ask a question

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A new employee at a desk being welcomed by a colleague leaning in to help

Click the photograph where you think a designer would stop and look closer.

Your first week, designed

Onboarding is not a paperwork event. It is the first learning experience an organization delivers, and it sets expectations for how people work together.

This module walks you through what the organization values, how decisions get made, and how to ask for what you need in your first thirty days.

By the end of this course you will be able to

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Why it matters
Most new hires decide in week one whether this is a place where asking a question is safe. That judgment shapes their ramp time far more than any policy they memorize.
Where you will use it
Your first project meeting, your first mistake, and the first time you need help from someone you have not met yet.

Behind the build

Design Decisions

The instructional thinking behind this learning experience. Every interaction has a purpose; every design decision supports a learning objective.

Learning challenge

New hires receive a week of information in a day, then spend a month unsure which question is safe to ask out loud.

Audience

Primary learners
New corporate employees in their first week.
Prior knowledge
Competent professionals with zero context about this organisation's norms.
Learning need
Fewer facts, more permission — and a clear picture of who to go to for what.
Context of use
Taken at a desk on day one, interrupted constantly, likely half-finished and resumed.

Learning objectives

  • Locate the person and channel to use for a given question.
  • Choose actions in week-one situations that match the organisation's stated culture.
  • Recognise the behaviours that signal a psychologically safe team.
  • Plan the first three conversations to have before the end of week one.

Design case study

Read the full breakdown

Challenge

Most onboarding programs front-load policy content and leave new hires unable to act. Information recall is high on day one and behavior change is low by week three.

Instructional strategy

Scenario-based design grounded in adult learning theory. Content is sequenced from orientation to application, with each value immediately followed by a decision the learner has to make. Practice precedes assessment, and feedback is instructional rather than evaluative.

Reflection

If I were building a second iteration, I would add a branching manager conversation so learners could practice raising a workload concern — the situation new hires most often report avoiding.

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