Welcome to Unpacked: Totara Thursdays, where each week we explore one Totara feature and its impact on modern learning strategy.
Imagine a new employee in your enterprise joining Monday morning. They are excited, hopeful, maybe a little anxious. Now imagine them by month three: well-connected, fully trained, contributing to business goals, thinking ahead about their career with you.
That shift, from new hire to engaged contributor, is exactly where onboarding becomes a strategic differentiator. When done right onboarding is not a checklist. It is the foundation of performance, retention and growth. For L&D decision-makers, HR executives and the C-suite this means one thing: what your people do in their first weeks influences what your organisation achieves in their first months and beyond.
In this post of our “Unpacked: Totara Thursdays” series we explore how using the Totara LMS (Learn & Perform) transforms onboarding into a business outcome.
Feature Overview
Totara brings together a powerful suite of tools that help organizations design onboarding experiences that actually work, not just in theory, but in the flow of real work. Its modular platform combines the capabilities of Totara Learn, Totara Perform, and robust reporting to turn onboarding into a continuous learning and growth journey from day one.
In most organizations, onboarding is still treated as an event, a checklist to complete before “real work” begins. Totara takes a different approach. It helps companies build ecosystems where new hires do not just learn what to do, but why it matters, connecting early learning moments to long-term performance and culture.
Totara Learn: From Orientation to Ongoing Learning
Totara Learn provides the foundation for structured, personalized, and scalable onboarding. It blends formal training, social learning, and real-time engagement to help new hires move from “getting started” to “adding value” faster.
Through Programs and Certifications, organizations can design guided learning paths that combine multiple courses and activities into a clear sequence. This ensures new hires complete all required training in the right order. Certifications can also renew automatically to support ongoing compliance so essential learning does not stop after the first week.
Dynamic Audiences automate enrollment so each new employee sees only what is relevant to their department, role, or location. Combined with HR Import, which syncs user data directly from HR systems or CSV files, this drastically reduces the admin load for L&D teams and ensures no one slips through the cracks.
Courses in Totara can deliver everything from company policies and compliance to role-specific skills and culture induction. Interactive elements like videos, quizzes, and SCORM packages keep the experience engaging. Blended Learning options make it easy to combine self-paced online modules with live workshops or virtual sessions.
Each learner’s journey is visible through Personalized Dashboards, which display onboarding checklists, progress bars, and relevant resources. This gives new hires clarity and ownership and gives managers confidence that their teams are moving forward.
Beyond formal training, Totara’s collaborative tools enrich the social and cultural side of onboarding.
Workspaces create digital communities where new hires can connect with peers, ask questions, and exchange ideas.
Playlists enable employees to share curated learning content, helping teams capture and spread best practices.
Surveys and Feedback loops give L&D teams real-time insights into how onboarding is landing and where it can improve.
Totara Learn connects the structure of a learning management system with the energy of a learning community, ensuring onboarding is efficient, human, adaptive, and ongoing.
Totara Perform: Setting the Stage for Long-Term Growth
While onboarding typically focuses on the first few weeks, Totara Perform extends that experience into an employee’s first months, aligning learning with performance and growth.
With Performance Activities and Check-ins, managers can set up regular conversations to discuss progress, provide feedback, and surface challenges early. These structured interactions help new hires feel supported while giving leaders visibility into how they are adapting.
Competency Frameworks link learning outcomes to job-specific skills, helping both the employee and manager see where development is needed. This turns onboarding into a stepping stone for career growth rather than a one-off event.
Through Goal Management, employees’ objectives are aligned with team and company priorities from the start. Managers can connect these goals directly to relevant courses or learning plans, ensuring development efforts translate into measurable impact.
In practice, this means that onboarding is not just about “settling in.” It is about aligning expectations, measuring progress, and reinforcing the habits and behaviors that drive performance.
Reporting: Turning Data into Insight
Totara’s Report Builder gives L&D leaders a real-time view of how onboarding is performing across the organization. You can track completion rates, engagement levels, assessment results, and participation in collaborative workspaces.
These insights help identify where employees are thriving and where additional support might be needed. When combined with the performance data from Totara Perform, reporting becomes a strategic tool for continuous improvement, linking onboarding success directly to retention, performance, and cultural integration.
Together, these capabilities make Totara far more than an LMS. It is a learning and performance ecosystem that helps organizations turn onboarding into a driver of engagement, alignment, and growth, setting new hires up for impact.
Strategic Alignment
The real value of onboarding does not come from completing modules or ticking boxes. It comes from alignment, between the individual and the organization, between learning and performance, and between early experiences and long-term growth.
Totara’s approach to onboarding is built around that alignment. It helps organizations connect the dots between people, learning, and business outcomes so the first days and weeks of employment become a launchpad for future contribution.
By integrating learning, performance, and engagement into a single talent experience platform, Totara transforms onboarding from an isolated HR process into a strategic business lever. It is not just about welcoming someone to the team, it is about accelerating time-to-productivity, embedding values, and reinforcing the competencies that drive your organization forward.
Here’s where onboarding with Totara directly supports organizational strategy:
Accelerating time-to-productivity: Structured, automated learning paths and blended onboarding journeys help new hires reach competency faster, reducing the time it takes for them to deliver measurable results.
Ensuring compliance and consistency: Built-in programs and certifications ensure every employee completes the right training in the right order, keeping compliance and quality standards intact across the business.
Building engagement and belonging: Social learning spaces and user-generated content create a sense of connection from day one, helping new hires feel seen, supported, and part of something bigger.
Embedding culture and values: Personalized learning pathways and collaborative workspaces reinforce company culture, helping new hires internalize “how things are done here” in a natural, authentic way.
Linking learning to performance: With Totara Perform, onboarding becomes part of an ongoing performance journey, ensuring learning is not only completed but applied, with regular check-ins, goal alignment, and measurable outcomes.
Enabling data-driven decisions: Robust reporting provides visibility into onboarding progress, engagement, and effectiveness, empowering L&D and HR leaders to adapt and improve programs continuously.
This alignment separates transactional onboarding from transformational onboarding. Instead of handing out information, organizations using Totara create environments that translate learning into performance and belonging.
Every new hire’s journey, from first login to first achievement, directly contributes to business performance. L&D is shaping culture, strengthening retention, and building the foundation for future leaders.
When onboarding is aligned to strategy, it stops being a cost center and becomes a growth engine. Totara gives L&D leaders the structure, flexibility, and insight to make that shift possible.
Practical Application: Real-World Success with Totara
Onboarding programs are only as good as the results they deliver. Totara’s capabilities come to life in practice, and two case studies illustrate how enterprise organizations have used the platform to transform onboarding into measurable outcomes.
Case Study A: Deloitte UK – Major Programmes Onboarding
Deloitte UK faced the challenge of onboarding practitioners into a major new business offering. The cohort was diverse, ranging from graduates to partners, and spread across multiple industries and geographies. Traditional onboarding methods were too rigid and inconsistent to meet their needs.
By using Totara, Deloitte created a blended, mobile-friendly onboarding journey. Snackable digital content, including podcasts, word-cloud exercises, and short videos, was combined with full-day workshops to reinforce practical skills and collaborative learning. Automatic progress emails, reflection logs, and 30/60/90-day action plans kept learners accountable and engaged.
The results speak for themselves: over 500 practitioners onboarded in 12 months, with an 85% learner satisfaction rate. The program scaled internationally without losing the personalized experience each participant received.
Key takeaways
Tailoring content for role diversity ensures relevance and engagement
Blending digital learning with in-person sessions strengthens retention and understanding
Structured follow-up, like action plans, ensures learning translates into applied behavior
Case Study B: Transavia – Cabin Crew Onboarding
For Transavia, a high-volume airline with regulatory compliance requirements, onboarding seasonal cabin crew was a logistical challenge. Manual processes were slow, and the quality of the onboarding experience varied.
Totara enabled a flipped-classroom model where trainees completed interactive e-learning modules before attending in-person sessions. Every step, from regulatory training to soft skills development, was tracked, ensuring compliance and operational readiness. Real-time dashboards allowed managers to monitor progress and intervene if any trainees struggled.
The results were significant: 83.6% pass rate among new crew, a reduction in paperwork, and the ability to scale onboarding during peak hiring periods. New employees were fully prepared to perform safely and confidently from their first flights.
Key takeaways
Role-specific, compliance-heavy onboarding benefits from automated tracking and blended learning
Early visibility into progress helps managers identify challenges and provide timely support
A structured, scalable onboarding program improves both operational readiness and employee confidence
Together, these case studies show that onboarding with Totara is not just about delivering content. It is about creating experiences that are relevant, personalized, measurable, and connected to real business outcomes. Whether the goal is compliance, speed-to-productivity, engagement, or retention, the platform helps organizations turn onboarding into a strategic advantage.
Impact & Takeaways: Turning Features into Strategic Value
Onboarding with Totara is more than a set of modules or courses. It is a strategic lever that directly impacts performance, engagement, retention, and long-term growth. By connecting structured learning, collaborative experiences, and performance management, organizations can ensure that every new hire not only completes their onboarding but starts contributing meaningfully, faster, more confidently, and with a sense of belonging.
The platform’s features translate into tangible value across multiple dimensions:
Faster Ramp-up: With onboarding managed via Totara, employees know what to do, when and why. The ramp to full productivity shrinks.
Stronger Engagement: Personalised pathways, social connection, peer-sharing all build belonging and early momentum.
Lower Attrition Risk: Early positive experiences signal “I belong and I can succeed here” which drives retention.
Alignment to Business Goals: Onboarding connects new hires to organisational strategy, values and performance from day one, not sometime later.
Better Talent Mobility: When onboarding is embedded in a platform that supports performance, goals and competencies, internal transfers and promotions are smoother and visible talent pipelines grow.
Data-Driven Improvement: With dashboards and reporting you can identify weak spots in onboarding, intervene early and continuously refine the experience.
The strategic impact goes beyond metrics. It shapes the first impression of the company, reinforces culture, and builds momentum for future learning and development. Every completed course, every workspace interaction, every goal check-in contributes to a larger narrative: that the organization invests in its people from day one and measures success in meaningful outcomes.
For L&D leaders and HR practitioners, the takeaway is clear. Totara’s integrated features do not just make onboarding easier; they make it smarter. They transform a traditionally transactional process into a dynamic, measurable, and strategic engine that supports business goals, strengthens talent pipelines, and ensures new hires start on a trajectory of success.
Reflection Prompt
Take a moment to step back and think about your current onboarding process. Are new hires truly set up to succeed from day one, or are there gaps where momentum is lost? Consider where employees might feel overwhelmed, disconnected, or unsure of their path. Imagine what it would look like if every new starter had a clear, personalized 30/60/90-day roadmap, a blend of engaging learning experiences, and regular check-ins that aligned directly with team and company goals. Picture the impact on productivity, engagement, and retention if that roadmap existed for every employee, not just as a plan, but as a lived experience that connects them to your organization from day one.
If you are ready to move onboarding beyond a process and into a strategic engine for performance and growth, it is time to explore what Totara can do for your organization. Book a demo of Totara Learn and Perform to see how personalized, role-based onboarding journeys can accelerate time-to-productivity, strengthen engagement, and lay the foundation for long-term talent development.
Subscribe to our Unpacked: Totara Thursdays series for more practical insights and examples that show how learning and development can drive measurable business outcomes. Make every first day matter and start turning onboarding into a tool for strategic impact.
Further Reading
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Totara Help Onboarding in Totara. https://totara.help/docs/onboarding-in-totara
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Totara Deloitte Launches a High-End Onboarding Journey. https://www.totara.com/customer-stories/deloitte-launches-a-high-end-onboarding-journey-for-their-major-programmes-practitioners-with-totara/
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Totara Elevating Onboarding at 30,000 Feet: Transavia Case Study. https://www.totara.com/customer-stories/elevating-onboarding-at-30000-feet-how-transavia-transformed-cabin-crew-training-with-totara/
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Totara Mastering Onboarding: 10 Essential Steps for a Smooth Start. https://www.totara.com/articles/mastering-onboarding-10-essential-steps-for-a-smooth-start/
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Totara 5 Ways to Accelerate Onboarding with Your LMS Software. https://www.totara.com/articles/5-ways-to-accelerate-onboarding-with-your-lms-software/
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Hubken Group Common Onboarding Mistakes and How to Avoid Them with the Totara TXP. https://www.hubkengroup.com/resources/common-onboarding-mistakes-and-how-to-avoid-them-with-the-totara-txp
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Totara Guide to Employee Onboarding in the New Normal. https://www.totara.com/resources/guide-to-employee-onboarding-in-the-new-normal/