Online onboarding: Library workplace training in a trilingual interactive online asynchronous environment

Abstract

The director of the library and learning center (LLC) instituted in 2017 a formal online orientation by requiring all student workers in the library, academic resource center, and office of information technology to take a pretest, watch an online training video, and take a posttest to successfully communicate the departments’ goals, history, and power structure (Bauer. Onboarding new employees: maximizing success. SHRM Foundation’s Effective Practice Guideline Series, 2010). Onboarding student workers, with varied schedules, who are expected to be competent with the job competencies of all job roles in an academic library department can be challenging. This chapter illustrated one academic library’s experiences training two international student workers and one librarian to design online onboarding training modules for student workers. Student workers’ pre- and post-module training are shared, and design plans for future iterations are discussed.