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Four weeks, a folder, and the word nobody explains
German induction tends to be more formal than the shrug-and-swim version common elsewhere, and knowing its shape lets you ask for the parts you are not given. Larger employers run an Einarbeitungsplan: a written schedule of what you learn in which week and who teaches it. If nobody mentions one, asking is entirely normal — Gibt es einen Einarbeitungsplan? — and it often produces one. You may also be assigned a Pate or Mentor, literally a godparent, whose job is the questions too small to take to a manager. That is the person to use, and using them heavily in the first month is expected rather than a sign of weakness. Two institutions turn up in the first fortnight. A Sicherheitseinweisung, a safety briefing, is legally required and will happen even in an office, where it is mostly fire exits. And in any company with more than a handful of staff, someone from the Betriebsrat — the works council, lesson 83 — will introduce themselves. That is not a union recruiting you; it is the statutory employee body, and the introduction is routine. The part that catches everyone is the vocabulary. Every German workplace has a layer of in-house terms and abbreviations, and a foreign speaker cannot tell which are standard German and which were invented in this building — freigeben genuinely means approve everywhere, while a Laufzettel or a JF might be local. Keep a list in the first month and ask in batches rather than one at a time; that is less disruptive and gets better answers. One cultural note about asking at all. There is a stereotype that German colleagues are impatient with questions. In practice the opposite is closer to the truth: a question asked before the work is done is welcome, and a mistake made silently because you did not ask is not. What is genuinely frowned on is asking the same thing three times, which is what the list is for. Yusuf's Der laufende Monat ist zum Lernen da is the standard attitude, and it has an expiry date — by month three, the expectation is that you look it up first and ask second.