A warehouse training plan: day one to week four

A warehouse training plan has exactly one job in week one, and it is not output. It is making sure the new starter cannot be badly hurt, and cannot hurt anybody else, while they learn the work. Stations, rates and accuracy all wait.

I spent eight years as operations director at a warehouse and manufacturing business shipping over 40,000 units a week. We hired constantly, in waves, often through agencies, often the week before peak. The plan below is what survived that: week one is the safety gate, week two is station SOPs with photo proof, week three is accuracy targets, week four is solo work and the probation checkpoint. Four weeks, one outcome per week, and a written definition of “done” for every station.

What does week one actually cover?

Week one is induction and nothing else. Not induction in the morning and picking in the afternoon — induction, completed and evidenced, before the starter works the floor unsupervised. The legal frame in Great Britain is section 2(2)(c) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, which requires employers to provide “such information, instruction, training and supervision as is necessary to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety at work of his employees”. Training after exposure to the risk does not satisfy that.

The gate has six parts, and all six get a signature before anyone picks:

• Site layout and traffic. Walking routes, pedestrian and vehicle segregation, exclusion zones around racking and the loading dock, what the floor markings mean. Walk it, do not slide it.
• Emergency arrangements. Exits, assembly point, first aiders, spill response, how to raise the alarm from the far corner of the building where nobody can hear you shout.
• Manual handling. Technique plus the task assessments in your manual handling procedure. Worth knowing: the Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992 set no legal maximum weight — HSE frames the duty as avoid, assess, reduce, so “is it under 25kg” is not the test anyone should be teaching.
• PPE issued and fitted. Safety footwear, hi-vis, gloves where the risk assessment calls for them, on day one, at no cost to the worker, with the rule about reporting damaged or ill-fitting kit. Our PPE policy template covers the wording.
• Housekeeping and floor condition. Spills, shrink wrap, banding, pallet debris and trailing leads cause more lost days than anything dramatic. The slips, trips and falls procedure is a week-one document, not a poster.
• Reporting. How to report an accident, a near miss, damaged racking or a broken pallet truck — and the explicit rule that nobody gets in trouble for reporting.

Done for week one looks like this: the starter can walk the site and name the routes and the exclusion zones without prompting, has their PPE, can say what they would do about a spill and about a near miss, and has signed for each induction topic against the version of the document they were actually taught. If they cannot do that on Friday, they do not start stations on Monday.

Why does nobody touch mechanical handling equipment in week one?

Because the answer to “I drove one at my last place” is always no. Every warehouse I have worked in had someone confident, plausible and unauthorised sitting on a truck within a fortnight of joining, and the reason it never became a crush injury was luck rather than management.

Regulation 9 of the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998 requires every employer to ensure that all persons who use work equipment have received adequate training for health and safety, including the risks that use may entail and the precautions to be taken. For lift trucks specifically, HSE's guidance sets out three stages of operator training — basic training, specific job training on the truck and site they will actually work, and familiarisation training on the job under supervision. A certificate from a previous employer covers, at best, the first of the three. The Approved Code of Practice is L117, Rider-operated lift trucks: operator training and safe use; check the current version before you sign anyone off.

What happens in week two on the stations?

Week two is the SOP week. The starter rotates through the stations the role needs — goods in, put-away, pick, pack, despatch — and runs each one with the written procedure open in front of them, supervised, at whatever speed accuracy demands. Two rules make this work.

First: the SOP has to exist before the rotation starts. If a station has no usable procedure, that station is not ready to be delegated and the honest fix is to write it, not to hand the starter to whoever is on shift. Our warehouse staff training SOP is the wrapper document for all of this: the induction gate, the equipment authorisation register, the station sign-offs and the records behind each one.

Second: photo proof from the first run, not the fifth. A completed put-away with a photo of the location and label. A packed order photographed before the box is taped. A despatch pallet photographed wrapped and labelled. Two things happen. The supervisor reviews real work instead of an impression, and the starter learns on day six that evidence is a normal part of the job rather than something imposed later when trust has broken down.

Sign-off at the end of week two is per station, not per person. “Trained” is not a status a warehouse worker holds. “Signed off on pack, not yet on goods in” is.

Why is shadowing the wrong default?

“Follow Dave for a fortnight” feels like training and mostly is not. Dave is usually the fastest picker on the floor, which is exactly why he gets given new starters, and his speed comes from six years of shortcuts that are safe only because he holds the knowledge underneath them. He knows which two SKUs look identical in a dim aisle. He knows which racking bay was re-labelled in March and never re-mapped. He can skip the scan confirmation because he is right ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

The new starter copies the shortcut and inherits none of the knowledge. You get a picker who moves at Dave's pace with a stranger's error rate, and you find out three weeks later in the mis-pick report. Shadowing is genuinely useful for one thing — watching how an experienced person handles the edge cases the SOP does not cover — so keep it, and put it after the documented rotation rather than instead of it. I have written before about training frontline teams that have no time for training; the short version is that documented practice beats observed practice on every measure except how it feels to the trainer.

How do you set accuracy targets in week three?

Week three the starter works the stations without a supervisor alongside, and for the first time they get a number. The number is accuracy, and it comes before rate.

Pick the metric each station is actually judged on — mis-picks per thousand lines, label errors, put-away locations that do not match the system, despatch shorts — set the standard your experienced team already hits, and share both. New starters hit accuracy standards far faster than managers expect when they are told the target exists. What wrecks them is being told nothing for a month and then being told they are slow.

Rate comes second and it comes with a stated ramp: a named percentage of the team standard by the end of week four, full standard by a named date after that. If you have never measured your team standard, week three of a new starter is the wrong moment to discover it, and your next stock take and inventory count is where the untracked errors will surface as variance nobody can explain.

Review the numbers with them weekly, in five minutes, at the desk. Two things going well, one thing to tighten, and a specific ask for the week ahead.

What does week four have to prove?

Week four is solo work and the probation checkpoint. Solo means the check happens after the work rather than during it: a full shift on a station, own decisions, escalation available but not hovering. If a starter has never worked a shift where nobody was watching, you do not know anything about them yet.

Then the probation review, and it is a review of evidence rather than of impressions. Pull the induction sign-offs, the equipment authorisations, the station sign-offs, the photo proof, the accuracy numbers for weeks three and four, and the notes from the weekly five-minute reviews. Set the meeting against whatever your probation policy commits you to — the review dates, notice terms and extension route should all be written down before you need them, not improvised in the room.

Three outcomes are legitimate: confirm, extend with a named gap and a named date, or end it. Ending it still runs on the notice and the process your probation policy sets out — and Acas states that from 1 January 2027 protection from unfair dismissal becomes a right after 6 months in a job, so short service is no longer the safety net managers assume it is. The one illegitimate outcome is letting it drift because nobody scheduled the meeting. A drifting probation always ends in the same place, six months later, with worse evidence and a harder conversation.

What does “done” look like per station?

Write this table for your own site before the next starter arrives. Vague sign-off criteria are why two supervisors sign off two different standards.

What to do on Monday

Take your next starter and write four lines: what week one gates on, which stations week two rotates through, what number week three introduces, and when the week four review is booked. Then write the “signed off when they can” sentence for each station, because that is the part every warehouse skips and every warehouse pays for later at the stock take.

If you want the induction gate, the authorisation register and the station sign-offs running in one place with the evidence attached, TrainedTeam for warehouse and manufacturing teams is free for up to 5 users and the warehouse templates come with it.