ICRC's Onboarding Programme: Designed to Prepare Their Staff for the Field

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is a custodian of the Geneva Convention. With an operational budget of €1.75bn for 2017, they respond whenever people are affected by armed conflict or disasters in conflict zones. For the past five years, the ICRC has been transforming the way it designs and delivers critical training to its 17,000 staff, in order to effectively and rapidly deploy its humanitarian services. Such responsiveness depends in large part on how quickly their staff in the field can be brought to full proficiency, making effective Onboarding critical. It is also important that their Onboarding Programme reflect the unique realities of the ICRC “workplace”.

The ICRC has been through a five-year transformation in how it designs and delivers the training needed to rapidly deploy its humanitarian services. Most recently, in partnership with CrossKnowledge, the ICRC has accelerated its evolution into a 21^st century learning organisation with a next-generation portal, iLearn, that makes targeted, learner-centric training available to all of its 17,000 staff.

The ICRC’s new Staff Integration Programme (SIP) is a recent example of this approach. Created with CrossKnowledge, SIP is a blended learning experience that brings together mobile and resident field staff through a combination of distance, classroom and collaborative workplace learning activities in three phases:

1. Online (5 weeks)