How To Onboard A New Tech In Under 1 Month

By Jonathan James, IT Glue

One of the most interesting findings in IT Glue’s 2019 Global MSP Benchmark Report is that the two biggest challenges MSPs face are hiring good techs and a lack of time. The two, of course, are related since if you could find good techs easily, you wouldn’t have to do so much yourself. But even when you find a good tech, almost 50% of MSPs report that it takes over 3 months to get that tech to 80% capacity. Normally you wouldn’t sweat that too much, but when unemployment for techs is basically zero, there’s a constant risk of turnover, and so you really do want to minimize the time it takes to get a tech up to speed. Retention is a whole other issue, but the faster you train techs, the more useful time you get out of them. 

So how do you get the onboarding time for new techs down to under a month? 

Self Service

If it takes forever to get a tech up to speed, and your senior techs are spending time training them for months, your entire business will suffer. Self service is the key to not only efficient training but to freeing your senior techs from the burden of constantly hand-holding the newer ones. A full library of SOPs makes it easier for new techs to learn how to perform their tasks exactly the way you want them to, every single time. Master the art of writing process documents and you’ll be better able to build a high quality training library.