Employee training plan template for new hires

Orientation and onboarding are two different jobs

Orientation is the administrative wrapper around a new starter: contract, payroll, laptop, access, logins, mandatory policy. It is finite, nearly identical for everyone, and measured by completion. Onboarding is the thing underneath: getting someone to where they can do the work, know they can do it, and know who to ask when they cannot. It is measured by capability, and it runs for months.

Templates usually fail by conflating the two. Week one fills with induction sessions and e-learning completions, the new hire is worn out by Wednesday, and they still have not touched the job. Give orientation a bounded slot, finish it, and protect the rest of week one for real work with someone sitting alongside.

Four strands are worth planning separately, because each needs different activities and different evidence.

• Orientation: anything with a completion tick, from contracts and IT access to mandatory policy.
• Competence: what you would notice missing three weeks in, not what feels urgent on day one.
• Connection: named people to ask about the product, the customer and the process.
• Confidence: one genuine piece of work shipped early and reviewed generously.

What actually belongs in a 30/60/90 structure

The 30/60/90 shape earns its place because it tracks a change in supervision, not a change in the calendar. In the first thirty days someone checks the work before it goes anywhere; in the second thirty the new hire works independently and the review happens afterwards; by the third they own outcomes and the conversation is about results rather than steps. Write each phase to say what the person starts doing and what the manager stops doing, because the second half is what most plans omit.

Bloom's taxonomy is useful as a gradient for the verbs. Week one belongs to identify, describe and follow; month two to apply, compare and diagnose; month three to evaluate, adapt and decide. If a day-90 objective still reads 'understands our product', it is a week-one objective wearing a later label, and nobody can tell whether it has been met.

Treat the 70-20-10 model as a design prompt rather than a ratio to hit: mostly real work, some coaching and shadowing, only a modest slice of formal instruction. If sessions outnumber tasks, the plan will feel like school.

• Days 1 to 30: shadowing, one supervised real task, full system access, permission to interrupt people.
• Days 31 to 60: independent work reviewed before it reaches a customer, and one project small enough to finish.
• Days 61 to 90: a defined slice of the job owned end to end and reviewed on outcomes.

Decide what they must do unsupervised by Friday

Work backwards from one sentence: by the end of week one, this person can do a specific thing with nobody watching. Most week-one plans list what the new hire will be shown, which cannot be checked; one unsupervised task is testable on Friday afternoon.

Write it as a SMART objective with the condition, the action and the standard all present. 'By day five, the new agent resolves a password reset ticket end to end using the internal runbook, without escalating, inside the standard response time' is a target; 'understands the ticketing system' is not. The specific version also settles what the week has to contain.

Gagné's nine events of instruction give a compact sequence for teaching that one skill: open with a real ticket rather than a slide, state the objective, connect it to something they can already do, demonstrate it, guide them through one, let them do the next alone, give feedback the same hour, check them on a live case, and name where they will use it again next week. Week-one teaching usually fails by skipping guided practice and going from demonstration straight to the deep end.

Making one template survive contact with different roles

A template that must serve a warehouse supervisor and a data analyst can only be shared at the level of the scaffold, so separate structure from payload. The structure is the phases, the checkpoint dates, the review questions and who signs off; it stays identical everywhere, and it is what makes two onboardings comparable. The payload is the systems, the tasks and the people, and it changes every time.

That works as four layers. The company layer applies to everyone and you write it once. The function layer covers everyone in sales, or engineering, or operations. The role layer covers this job title and is reused for every hire into it. The person layer is this individual's actual gaps, and nobody can generate that for you.

• Keep the checkpoint dates and the review questions identical across roles.
• Vary the competences, the named systems and the first real task.
• Cap the role layer at a page; longer means you are rewriting the handbook.
• Treat an internal move as a real onboarding: little orientation, often more coaching, because everyone assumes the person knows.

Check that it worked, not that it happened

Kirkpatrick's four levels are worth using precisely rather than as a slogan. Reaction asks whether the new hire found the week useful: cheap to collect, and close to silent on capability. Learning should be assessed with a task rather than a quiz. Behaviour is the level that matters for onboarding, and it can only be seen at sixty or ninety days by watching real work. Results should reuse a number you already track.

Spaced practice fits onboarding naturally, because the intervals fall inside a document you are already writing. Instead of teaching the CRM once on day two and hoping it sticks, put brief retrieval checks into the plan at widening intervals.

• Day 5: one real task done unsupervised and reviewed the same day.
• Day 30: twenty minutes of recall on week one, framed as work rather than a test.
• Day 60: the manager watches a live piece of work instead of reading a report about one.
• Day 90: compare against a number you already track, such as time to first solo delivery.

What a generated plan gives you, and what it cannot

A generated plan compresses the design step of ADDIE: objectives, structure, sequence and an assessment approach, in about twenty seconds rather than an afternoon. It does not do your analysis. It does not know that the role has been hard to fill, that the last two hires left in month three, or that the system everyone actually uses is a spreadsheet. Nor can it do implementation, where onboarding plans usually die.

Treat the output as a first draft with the right bones. Before it reaches a manager, name the systems, name who to ask for each kind of question, replace the generic activities with your genuine first task, set real dates against the checkpoints, and delete anything you cannot staff. A short plan with three named people and one real task beats a comprehensive one nobody owns.

Generate one above and see whether the structure fits the role you are hiring into. Copying and printing are free; editing in place and PDF or Word export come with Premium.

Common questions

What should a 30/60/90 day employee training plan include?

Define each phase by how much supervision the new hire has, not by how much content they have worked through. Days 1 to 30 are supervised real work alongside orientation, days 31 to 60 are independent work reviewed before it reaches a customer, and days 61 to 90 are ownership of a defined slice of the job, reviewed on outcomes. Give each phase two or three objectives written as things the person can do, plus a dated checkpoint and a named person who signs it off.

What is the difference between orientation and onboarding?

Orientation is administrative: contracts, payroll, access, equipment and mandatory policy. It is bounded, largely the same for everyone, and measured by completion. Onboarding is the longer process of building competence, confidence and connection in the actual job, and it is measured by what the person can do unsupervised. Both are necessary, but letting orientation swallow week one is the most common way a plan fails.

How do I decide what a new hire should be able to do alone by the end of week one?

Pick the smallest real task in the role that a competent colleague does routinely, and make that the week-one target. Write it as a SMART objective with the condition, the action and the standard, so it can be checked on Friday rather than argued about later. Anything in the week that serves neither that target nor orientation is negotiable.

Can one template cover different roles?

Only if you separate the scaffold from the content. Keep the phases, the checkpoint dates, the review questions and the sign-off identical across every role, then vary the competences, the named systems and the first real task. That gives you consistency where it is useful and specificity where it is needed, and it stops each new hire's plan becoming a fork of the master document.

Is the generated plan ready to hand to a manager as it is?

No, and treating it that way is the quickest route to a plan nobody follows. The generator produces the structure: objectives, modules with lessons and activities, and assessment methods. It does not know your systems, your team or your calendar, so a manager still needs to name the tools, name the people, attach real dates and swap the generic activities for the team's actual first task.

Do I need an account to generate a plan?

No. You can generate a real plan from this page without signing up, up to three times a day per network. The preview shows the full set of objectives and a complete first module, with the remaining modules listed as titles; a free account shows every module in full and saves one plan to your dashboard.

Can I export the plan to PDF, Word or our LMS?

Copying the plan to the clipboard and printing it are available on the free plan. PDF and Word export are Premium features at $19 a month, along with unlimited plans and editing a plan in place; the Word export is a real .docx that opens in Word, Pages and Google Docs. There is no SCORM package or direct LMS integration, so anything going into an LMS goes in as pasted text.