Make Experiential Learning Part of the Onboarding Process

While organizations relay a lot of informationto employees throughout the onboarding process, it’s important for new hires totake ownership of their learning. That doesn’t mean they decide what activitiesto complete or what content to consume; instead, it refers to the active roleemployees play in synthesizing new information and connecting it to what theyalready understand. This is a process that is embedded into experientiallearning.

This way of thinking translates to how new hiresarticulate their knowledge as well. For example, if an onboarding manager assigns a video exercise around organizational norms, employees should have some freedom to choose howto demonstrate the necessary competencies to complete it. Not only is this kindof activity a real-world application of knowledge, but it also represents thefirst step of experiential learning.

People often equate experiential learning with “learningby doing” or “hands-on learning,” but those phrases don’t accurately sum up theentire concept. It takes more than a firsthand learning experience for anexercise to be experiential. 

As part of his experiential learning theory, DavidA. Kolb uses four “bases” of learning—experiencing, reflecting, thinking, andacting—to describe how knowledge is created through the transformation of experience.Kolb and other educational researchers believe that when the learning processstops after the experience, it limits an individual’s ability to reflect onwhat they’ve done and gain a deeper understanding from it.

To ensure new hires retain more information andunderstand exactly what an organization expects from them, onboarding managersshould leverage the power of experiential learning.

But how can they, especially when a new hiremust complete most of their onboarding program from a distance?

The right video assessment platform can provideall the resources onboarding managers need to do just that.

Howvideo assessment enables experiential learning

Video often plays a big role in onboardingprograms, but this technology alone isn’t enough to enable experientiallearning. Since reflection must occur following an individual’s experience, theproper solution must support some form of self-assessment. The bestvideo assessment platforms include features where learners cancreate a video, self-assess it prior to submission, and then re-record it ifnecessary.

The importance of reflecting on priorperformance can’t be overstated. Most people are their own harshest critics, sojust having new hires watch themselves demonstrating a skill or completing atask on video allows them to become a source of internal feedback forthemselves. Using their observations from the previous video, employees havethe opportunity to improve on their performance each time they reflect.

Since the experiential learning process iscyclical, every aspect of it connects together. In other words, the processdoesn’t just stop once an employee submits a video to their onboarding manager.Not only will the employer also have more feedback, they might tailor the nextpart of the new hire’s onboarding based on their performance as well. Thismight include more information the employee can synthesize and act on. All ofthis new data then impacts the next video activity, or experience, they have.Again, this process continuously repeats.