Your local bank branch shouldn’t feel cold or impersonal; it should feel like part of your community. That’s why our client-partner, a premier financial services organization, relies on a high-touch approach to banking.
After the massive workforce shifts of the early 2020s, that relationship-based model faced intense pressure. Experienced bankers moved on, taking critical institutional knowledge and branch mentorship with them. Meanwhile, new hires, many from outside the banking industry, entered the high-stakes, high-volume branch environment with limited support.
Though these new hires were well-versed in customer service, absorbing the volume of banking and regulatory information, complex product options, and intricate backend software systems during traditional onboarding felt overwhelming. In fact, the sheer volume of information they were expected to absorb during onboarding sparked early attrition among some new hires.
The organization faced a critical tension: New hires needed time and practice to develop banking skills, but time spent in training meant time away from serving customers. The organization needed a new onboarding approach that could build expertise, reduce cognitive overload, and accelerate job readiness within new hires’ current flow of work.
It takes thorough needs analysis, learner and stakeholder input, and plenty of imagination to reinvent new hire onboarding. Discover how the team co-created a newly social, engaging, and application-focused experience with the complete case study.
To explore the possibilities, the SweetRush team led the client’s stakeholders, compliance leaders, and subject matter experts (SMEs) through its proprietary CoDesignSM experience. Via a series of five interactive workshops, CoDesign guides teams through inquiry-based activities aimed at exploring business and learning needs—and co-creating an instructional strategy that meets both.
✏️ Goal:
Transform the New Banker Onboarding Experience
📉 Result:
Via a resulting blended learning journey helps to reduce new hires’ cognitive overload through focused learning paths that deliver knowledge and skills tied to concrete banking products and job tasks. Each learning path contains interactive infographics and eLearning modules to build understanding; simulations and live virtual instructor-led training (VILT) sessions to enable practice; and in-branch observations to connect learning to real life.
Best of all, the transformed journey cut onboarding time in half and reduced the reliance on in-person instructor-led training by more than 80%.
The right-sized onboarding journey delivers the right knowledge at the right moment—and supports it with hands-on practice, in-branch job shadowing, and social learning.
Here are just a few of the elements that make the reimagined onboarding experience so successful:
For more about the modalities that helped new bankers succeed sooner, download the full case study for a learner’s-eye view of the road to job readiness.
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SweetRush delivers innovative learning and development solutions, including custom eLearning, immersive training, and talent development strategies.
