Employee knowledge base

An employee knowledge base solves one problem — a new person finds the answer alone without distracting colleagues. A huge encyclopedia does not do that well. A clear route does — what to read on day one, what in the first week, and how to check that it all makes sense.

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A route instead of an encyclopedia#

Split the base into two layers:

  1. The newcomer route — one page with an order: day one, week one, month one. Every step links to the guide it needs and says what should come out of it.
  2. The reference — guides, policies, answers to questions. Links lead to them from the route and from work issues.

Checklists in markdown#

The route works well as a task list with checkboxes:

- [ ] Get access: email, repositories, chat
- [ ] Read "How our releases work"
- [ ] Do your first issue labelled "good first issue"

The newcomer copies it into their own issue and ticks off what is done — the manager sees progress without asking.

Checking understanding#

Next to the materials you can put a short challenge: stages with questions and automatic answer checking (pick an option, type an answer, put steps in order, match pairs). The employee goes through it alone and sees their own progress, and the questions come back to them for review. A challenge in a private organization repository is visible only to those who can see the repository — internal policies can be checked right where they live.

To be honest about a limit: the author of a challenge has no shared log of every employee's results. If you need a report, ask people to attach their result to their onboarding issue.

How to keep the base current#

  • each section has an owner (CODEOWNERS);
  • edits go through pull requests — you see what changed;
  • a newcomer who finds something outdated opens an issue — the best source of updates there is;
  • once a quarter, section owners look through their pages.

Where to keep it#

A private organization repository: access by team, the history of every edit, export as an archive. There is no full-text search yet, so the route and the tables of contents matter more here. For the wider company-wide side, see the company knowledge base page.

Try it on your own task

Create a repository — history, issues and pull requests from day one.

Create a repository

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