How to Set Your New Employees Up for Growth | Entrepreneur

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A successful business isn’t just about the number of clients or the revenue it generates. For me, real success is about the employees who grow within the company. When team members stick around, are eager to learn, and evolve over time, that’s where I see true achievement.

If these people choose to stay and grow, it means the company is doing something right.

In my last article, I discussed how we find and hire loyal team members. But once we’ve selected the right candidates, our focus shifts to their growth and development.

At my video editing company, we have a whole system for onboarding and educating employees, and I’d love to share it with you. We’re not just filling a position; we’re investing in their future and, by extension, the future of the business.

Step 1. In-house course

Wedding videography is a unique industry with its own quirks and challenges. At some point, while growing the business, we realized that there wasn’t enough talent for us in the market. We met many talented professionals — TV videographers and social media video editors — but they often lacked the vision needed for wedding videography.

So, we decided —that if we want to maintain high and consistent quality, we need to build our own talent. That’s when we developed our onboarding course, which has also become an important part of our hiring process.

Our Head of Video Editing finished the whole thing in two months. He recorded 11 lessons using Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Final Cut Pro as the main tools.

The course covers all the tricky spots: storytelling for different parts of the wedding, color correction, color grading, and sound design — because, let’s face it, audio can make or break a video. We also make sure our new editors understand the nuts and bolts of project management, for instance, how to structure and organize their projects and folders.

After completing the course, our final candidates work on their first paid project. If everything goes well, they join our team. This course has been a game-changer ever since. It has helped us educate more than 50 employees and teach them everything needed in just a week and a half.

If you’re having trouble finding niche professionals, consider creating a similar course. It’s a great way to turn generalists into experts in your field or give newbies the tools they need to get started.

Step 2. Knowledge base

Once someone officially joins our team, we give them access to our Knowledge Base in Notion. This is where we’ve gathered everything new employees need to know about the company — who our clients are, how we communicate with them, our mission, our goals — you name it. It’s all there for them to read and get to know the company.

We trust our new hires to take the initiative and explore our Knowledge Base on their own. Of course, if they have any questions along the way, we’ve got mentors ready to guide them through any uncertainties. This approach gives them the chance to understand the company at their own pace while knowing they’ve got support whenever they need it.

Step 3. Competency Matrix

The learning doesn’t stop there. As a new employee joins the company, we add their name to the file called a Competency Matrix.

It’s a table that lists all the skills our video editors need to develop. These include hard skills, like creating project storyboards and adding subtitles, as well as soft skills, such as discipline and meeting deadlines.

Here’s how it works: for each skill listed in the Matrix, there’s a cell containing an article about that skill, along with a link to a test the employee must complete after reading.

If the test is successfully passed, the skill cell lights up green. If not, it’s marked red. This neat way to visualize progress and ensure our team members master the necessary techniques is ideal.

So, as new employees work their way through the Matrix, they’re turning those cells green one by one. Our leads are there to oversee the whole process and help them adapt.

This table has proven to be incredibly efficient, giving us a clear picture of the team’s progress. For instance, if we notice that a particular skill is often marked red, it’s a signal that the whole team could benefit from additional training.

To address this, we either prepare an internal course or hire an external expert.

Step 4. Giving a clear path

Another great thing about the Matrix is that it doesn’t just track progress; it also helps us set clear growth expectations for our employees. For example, if someone has 80% of their hard skill cells green and has completed a certain number of projects, they can be promoted to a senior video editor. It also raises their compensation by 25%.

If their soft skill cells are mostly green, too, they’re eligible to apply for a team lead role when we have new openings. This system makes career advancement transparent and achievable, which motivates our team to keep improving.

We also occasionally add new skills to the Matrix to keep up with industry trends. For instance, our Head of Editing might spot a new tool or technique on the market and ask someone on the team to try it out.

If it proves valuable, that person educates the entire team and leads the direction in incorporating this new skill. This way, we’re constantly evolving, and our team members have the chance to pioneer new directions within the company.

To sum up

The onboarding process we’ve set up has done more than just speed up adaptation; it laid the groundwork for the culture of continuous learning and growth within our team.

While not everyone can move into leadership roles, at least we make sure that everyone reaches a high level of expertise in video editing. All this training is a big investment, true, but without it, we wouldn’t see the growth that we strive for.

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