A new starter costs more IT time in their first fortnight than in the rest of the year put together. Most of that time goes on small things: a missing licence, a printer nobody mentioned, a shared folder they were never told about. None of it is difficult, and almost all of it is repeatable.
An IT induction is the document that stops the same fortnight repeating for every hire. It is short, it lives somewhere people can find it, and one named person keeps it current.
Start with the list of accounts
Write down every account a person in each role needs on their first morning. Not the accounts they might want later. The ones without which they cannot start.
For most organisations that means an email and identity account, the licences attached to it, access to the file store, and whatever line of business system the role uses. A finance role and a delivery role will differ in that last item and in nothing else, which is why the list is worth writing per role rather than per person.
Put the approver next to each account. If the sales system needs a manager to sign off, name the manager. A list that says who approves what turns a two day wait into a same day one.
Say where files are meant to live
Most file sprawl starts in week one. Somebody is not told where the team keeps its documents, so they save to the desktop, then to a personal folder, then to a cloud account of their own. By the time anyone notices, there are three copies of everything.
The induction should name the two or three places that are correct, and say plainly that nothing else is backed up. That one sentence does more for recovery than most backup policies do.
If you use a shared workspace, show the new starter the top level and the naming they are expected to follow. If you still use a mapped drive, say so, and say which one.
Give them one route to support
New starters ask whoever is nearest. That is reasonable, and it is also how support work becomes invisible. Nothing gets recorded, nobody sees the pattern, and the same fault gets fixed six times by six different people.
Name one route. An address, a form, a phone number. Say what response to expect and what counts as urgent, because a new starter has no way of knowing whether a broken monitor is an emergency.
It helps to say what support does not cover. If personal devices are out of scope, or if a piece of software is the supplier’s responsibility rather than yours, the induction is the cheapest place to say it.
Cover the security habits, briefly
This part is usually either missing or far too long. Four things are enough for day one.
- How passwords are managed, and whether a password manager is provided.
- That multi factor authentication is on, and what the prompt looks like.
- What to do with an unexpected request for money, bank details or credentials, including a request that appears to come from a colleague.
- Who to tell if something looks wrong, with the clear message that reporting late is worse than reporting nothing.
Write the last point as permission rather than a rule. People hide mistakes when they expect blame, and a hidden mistake is the expensive kind.
Add the small things people never think to ask
Printing. Meeting room screens. The guest network. How to book a desk if desks are booked. Whether the door fob and the computer login are the same system or two different ones.
These are the questions people feel awkward asking in week three, so they stop asking and work around them instead. A single line each in the induction removes the awkwardness.
Keep it to two pages and keep it current
A long induction is not read. Two pages is usually enough if it links out for detail rather than containing it.
Give it an owner and a review date. The most common failure is not a bad induction but a stale one, describing a system that was replaced a year ago. A five minute check every quarter is enough, and the best trigger for it is the next new starter.
One practical test: hand the document to somebody who joined six months ago and ask them to mark anything that is now wrong. They will find things the author cannot see.
What to do with it once it exists
Send it to the new starter before their first day, together with the date their accounts will be ready. Walk through it with them in the first week rather than leaving it as reading. Most of the value is in the conversation it prompts, not in the text.
Then look at your support requests three months later. If the same first week questions are still arriving, the induction is missing something, and the requests will tell you what.
We set this up as part of onboarding for the organisations we support. You can read how we handle day to day requests on our IT support page, or tell us what your first week looks like now and we will suggest what to write down first.