Forming and educating new employees in Professional Service Firms:

Abstract: Professional Service Firms' (PSF) profits are according to Maister (2003) directly linked to how well they are able to leverage the professional skills of their seniors with the work of their juniors. In addition, these organizations often face a constant and substantial inflow of new employees. Hence, it can be argued that a crucial factor for their competitiveness concerns how well the new recruits are introduced to the firms and their new roles. It is especially vital that new recruits in an efficient way are introduced to the firms' knowledge base, grow into their roles as consultants and as fast as possible contribute and add value in projects. Firms try to secure this by establishing more or less formalized introduction phases. This thesis aimed at studying these introduction phases and especially analyzed how PSFs organize the process of forming and educating newly graduated junior consultants. This was conducted through an explorative research approach and by the use of qualitative data. LynxEye AB was studied as a main case and their way of working was contrasted against eight different reference firms. Nine arenas were found to be central parts of LynxEye's introduction phase and by the use of both human resource management and knowledge management literature, it was analyzed how they contributed to the forming and education of newly graduated consultants. Many arenas filled more than one function and they were often interrelated. Furthermore, the analysis also showed that structure of the different PSFs' introduction phases was determined by the firms' main focus. Lastly, the authors' of this thesis suggested that in order for a PSF to have a coherent introduction phase, the structure should be based upon a clear and explicit personnel concept.