There is nothing more rewarding than guiding someone who is brand new to ServiceNow, or the consulting industry, along the beginning of their career path - or watching a new colleague blossom within their role. We pride ourselves on our nurturing culture and willingness to give opportunities to those new to the industry. With this in mind, we at Unifii have been trialling an onboarding process for our new colleagues who come to us with little or no experience in ServiceNow (or the tech industry in general). Here's a quick overview of what it entails!

The Unifii Way of Onboarding

There are three main goals that the new onboarding programme aims to achieve:

• Welcome new colleagues onboard in a supportive but challenging environment

• Give them the tools to become fully billable as consultants within a matter of months

• Establish contacts and relationships that will help them to help them grow their career at Unifii

Currently, we're running a pilot scheme for the programme, and we're using this time to learn about how we can provide the best possible environment for new colleagues to learn and grow. As a result of that, we currently have quite a mix of people on board, with a range of experiences both from Unifii and elsewhere.

Some people are at university and working with us part-time on an internship. For those participants there is a strong focus on company culture, our processes, and expectations. Others have come from other industries, so we cover the specific facets of IT consulting. We also have some members who have joined us from the ServiceNow NextGen program, which means they come to Unifii with a solid grounding of technical knowledge. For these, we're aiming to bridge the gap between how to perform certain tasks technically and why customers might need those tasks done - a consultative approach.

For all members of the programme, though, we're focusing heavily on developing independent learning (with support) and establishing the Unifii way of working - our unique ethos and core values that set us apart.

How are we achieving this?

The programme lasts three months and the overall approach is two-pronged.

Context, understanding, and relationship building

For this, we have a two-month schedule of what we’re calling TED Talks. The hosts are one or two people from different parts of the business, who give an hour or so of their time to talk about their area of expertise.

Some of the topics included are:

• What is ServiceNow? - hosted by our Managing Director, Mike Glock

• Unifii - who are we? - hosted by our Managing Director, Steve Mamelok

• Update sets - hosted by me

• ServiceNow practice areas - hosted by our head of practice leads, Julia, and the various practice leads heads

• And many more, including stories, projects, peer reviewing, and all sorts of other interesting topics

As you can see, we cover a range of topics, from fundamental and technical to a more birds-eye view of what we think is necessary to understand their role.

Technical knowledge

Along with this, we focus on how to work on tasks independently. For this purpose, we have developed a library of Learn and Exercise content, containing topics such as client scripts, UI Actions, reference qualifiers, and other ServiceNow fundamentals. This content is to be worked on throughout the whole three-month programme. The library sits in our internal knowledge base and contains:

• An overview of the topic

• Example requirements (usually taken from past customer projects)

• Development key points

• Links to documentation and other resources

• Finally, it contains some exploratory exercises for the participant to complete in their Personal Development Instance (PDI)

PDIs have been designed to encourage participants to explore the demo data and experiment with their PDI. These knowledge articles can then be used as a reminder, or cheat sheet when implementing real-life requirements in the future.

During this process, participants are also working through the ServiceNow Fundamentals On-Demand course, which is a wonderful way of learning a huge amount about ServiceNow flexibly. This works well alongside the Learn and Exercise library and TED Talks, which have a Unifii spin. The participants then get involved hands-on in projects and put to use the knowledge they have gained in a practical way, with a solid foundation.

In the future, we hope to expand on the onboarding programme by adjusting the TED Talk schedule and Learn and Exercise to different roles and experience levels, and run it periodically several times a year.