Tempo di lettura: 9 minuti
Peak season will put more first-timers on the warehouse floor. Is your training built for that?
Most warehouse training is designed for a steady trickle of new hires who have someone to learn from. Peak season replaces that with groups of first-timers, many on shifts with no trainer, and training built for the first scenario fails in the second.
Warehouse training for peak season has a structural problem: it is designed for the new hires of an ordinary month, and peak brings a different kind of new hire. In Spain, Randstad expected transport and logistics to sign almost 160,000 contracts during the Christmas 2025 campaign alone.¹ A large share of those people have never worked in that warehouse, and many have never worked in any warehouse.
That would be a staffing question if warehouses were low-risk places. They are not. Spain's national health and safety institute (INSST) recorded an accident rate in warehousing and transport support activities 37% above the national average in 2024. It also rose 6.3% on the previous year, while the overall rate fell in every sector.²
In this article we look at who actually arrives at peak, why the usual way of training them breaks, and five questions to check whether your training was built for first-timers or only adapted for them at the last minute.
The person who joins a warehouse in March and the person who joins in late November are not the same profile. The data points in the same direction on several fronts:
| Indicator | Figure | What it means for training |
|---|---|---|
| Logistics contracts in the Christmas 2025 campaign (Spain) | Almost 160,000¹ | Inductions happen in groups, not one by one |
| Accident rate in warehousing vs national average (Spain, 2024) | 3,738.8 vs 2,732.6 per 100,000 workers² | The environment punishes mistakes more than most |
| Accident rate of men on temporary vs permanent contracts (Spain, 2024) | 5,064.3 vs 4,081.6 per 100,000² | Temporary contracts carry about 24% more accidents |
| Foreign workers among transport affiliates (Spain, end of 2025) | 17.7%, the fastest-growing sector (+26% in a year)³ | Training in one language leaves people behind |
None of these numbers proves that a given temporary worker will have an accident. They describe the population a warehouse training programme has to serve in November: more people, newer to the job, more often on short contracts and more often working in a second language.
There is also a time factor. Research by the Institute for Work & Health, a Canadian centre that has tracked work injuries for decades, found that people in their first month on a job have over three times the risk of a lost-time injury compared with colleagues who have been there more than a year.⁴ Peak season concentrates the whole temporary workforce inside that first month.
A new hire with warehouse experience needs to learn the site: where things are, which rules are local, how this operation works. A first-timer needs all of that plus the basics that experienced people no longer think about.
Experienced colleagues struggle to teach this because it has become invisible to them. Ask a picker with five years on the floor to explain a pick route and they will skip half the steps, not because they are careless, but because those steps are automatic. The knowledge first-timers need most is the knowledge veterans are least able to put into words.
Most warehouse training works perfectly well for most of the year. It rests on three assumptions that hold in March and fail in November.
Ordinary onboarding relies on shadowing: the new hire follows someone who knows the job. At peak, the ratio inverts. One experienced picker may have four new ones around them, all while carrying their own target. On night and weekend shifts, which grow fastest, the person who usually runs inductions is often not on site at all.
When shadowing is the main training method and there is nobody to shadow, the training does not get worse. It disappears, and what is left is "stay close to whoever has been here longest".
In a normal month, a new picker gets a few days of slack before anyone looks at their rate. At peak, they are hired precisely because volume has arrived. Productivity targets start early, and pressure to hit numbers is one of the main reasons new people skip steps they were shown once.
Training that assumes a gentle ramp, with a long induction on day one and learning on the job after that, does not survive a floor where everyone is behind from the first hour.
The induction deck was written for someone who reads the local language comfortably, at a desk, and it describes the warehouse as it was when it was written. Peak breaks both sides. A growing share of the new workforce works in a second language,³ and the operation itself changes: temporary racking, rented equipment, an extra carrier, a different returns flow.
The result is training that is technically delivered and practically useless. A signature on the attendance sheet, a person who did not follow half of it, and procedures that no longer match the floor.
Fixing this does not mean longer inductions. It means designing for the person who will actually arrive, in the conditions they will actually arrive in. The difference shows up across the whole design:
| Design choice | Built for steady-state hiring | Built for peak first-timers |
|---|---|---|
| Who delivers it | A trainer or an experienced colleague, in person | Short modules anyone can complete before the shift, plus a named buddy on every shift |
| When | Day one, then on the job | Before the first shift, then short refreshers during peak |
| Length | Half a day or a full day at once | Modules of a few minutes each, under an hour in total before starting |
| Starting point | Assumes warehouse basics | Covers the basics experienced people take for granted |
| Language | The local language only | The languages the incoming workforce actually speaks |
| Content updates | Once a year, if at all | Every time the operation changes mid-season |
| Proof | Attendance sheet | Completion record per person, with a short check of understanding |
The second column is not more expensive by default. What makes it hard is that it has to be ready weeks before peak, in several versions, and kept up to date while the operation changes. That is production work, and in most warehouses it lands on one or two people who are also running recruitment and rotas.
That is the part that can be taken off their plate. Tools like Vidext prepare short courses from the procedures, recordings and documents a warehouse already has, in the languages its people speak, while the training team keeps the final say: nothing reaches the floor until someone has approved it. For the content each role needs, our guide to health and safety training in logistics goes through it job by job.
If you want to know whether your training is built for first-timers, answer these five questions honestly about your own site.
Read it as if you had never seen a forklift or a pick list. If it assumes vocabulary or habits that a first-timer does not have, they will nod along and miss the point.
If the honest answer depends on whether the coordinator stays late, the night shift is getting a different, shorter version, usually from whoever is around.
Check the languages on this year's contracts, not last year's. The incoming workforce changes faster than the training material.
Temporary racking, rented equipment and new carriers are usually decided in October. If the training does not mention them, it describes a warehouse that will not exist during peak.
If an inspector or an auditor asked tomorrow, the answer should be a record per person, not a box of sign-in sheets from different shifts. Spanish law requires training at the moment of hiring, whatever the type or length of the contract,⁵ and the burden of proof is on the employer.
Three or more "no" answers mean the training was built for March and is being stretched to cover November. For the onboarding side of the same problem, it is worth seeing how other logistics teams onboard drivers and warehouse operators with video and AI.
The usual response to peak is to run more inductions, faster. It feels like action, but it scales the same model that breaks under peak conditions: it still depends on a trainer being present, on people having time to absorb it, and on material written for someone else.
Warehouses that get through peak with fewer incidents tend to do something less visible. They decide, weeks before the first agency worker arrives, that the person they are training is a first-timer on a night shift, working in a second language, in a warehouse that has just changed, and they build the training for that person. Everyone else on the floor benefits from it too.
Several factors stack up: they are new to the job, often new to the site, frequently on short contracts and under productivity pressure from the start. Spain's INSST recorded a higher accident rate among male employees on temporary contracts than among those on permanent contracts in 2024,² and international research shows the first month on any job carries the highest risk.⁴ Training cannot remove all of these factors, but it is the one the employer controls most directly.
Long enough to cover the site's main risks and the basics of the role, short enough to finish before the first shift. In practice, that usually means a set of short modules adding up to under an hour, followed by on-the-job supervision and short refreshers during peak, rather than a single long session on day one.
The legal duty is the same: in Spain, article 19 of Ley 31/1995 requires training at the moment of hiring regardless of contract type or length.⁵ In practice, the content often needs more basics for peak hires, because many are first-timers who lack the warehouse habits permanent staff already have.
By preparing the induction in the languages the incoming workforce actually speaks, checked against this year's hires, and keeping visual content (photos, short videos of the real site) at the centre of it. Translating only the safety rules and leaving the rest in the local language tends to leave gaps exactly where mistakes happen.
Four to six weeks before the first new starters arrive. Procedures need to reflect the operation as it will be during peak, content needs to exist in the right languages and every shift needs a named buddy and a shift lead who knows what to check.
¹ La campaña de Navidad dejará más de 9.500 contratos en Baleares, según Randstad - Última Hora ² Informe anual de accidentes de trabajo en España. Datos 2024 - INSST ³ La Seguridad Social suma más de 800.000 afiliados extranjeros desde la reforma laboral y cierra 2025 en máximos históricos - La Moncloa ⁴ Study finds persistence of higher injury risk for new workers - Institute for Work & Health ⁵ Ley 31/1995, de 8 de noviembre, de Prevención de Riesgos Laborales - BOE
Programma di promozione dell'assunzione a tempo indeterminato di giovani qualificati, nell'ambito del Sistema Nazionale di Garanzia Giovani. Vidext ha ricevuto una sovvenzione di 25.401€, concessa da LABORA (Servizio Valenciano per l'Impiego e la Formazione), per l'assunzione a tempo indeterminato nel 2024 di giovani qualificati iscritti al Sistema Nazionale di Garanzia Giovani, azione suscettibile di cofinanziamento da parte del Fondo Sociale Europeo Plus (FSE+) 2021-2027 o di qualsiasi altro fondo dell'Unione Europea. Expediente ECOGJU/2024/550/46. La presente pubblicazione è effettuata in adempimento degli obblighi di trasparenza stabiliti dalla Legge 19/2013, del 9 dicembre.
