The current job market in software engineering is marching on as we speak, with many jobs, high turnover and employers doing all they can to hire more engineers while holding on to the ones they have. This has prompted plenty of employers to raise salaries, especially to new hires to lure them, but some say they simply cannot do that beyond what they have already done. There is something that is mentioned as a way to overcome this, but there is a real question about it.
How accessible are professional development benefits? It’s an open but important question.
Plenty of companies are talking about spending money to help employees develop. There is also some talk about this in general employment circles as an employee perk that can be a difference-maker, so it has become a popular idea. It sounds great on paper, and such benefits can endear companies to their employees, but how accessible is this to everyone?
This isn’t a question necessarily about equality due to race, gender or another factor, although there can be an element of that in play. The question is more about the fact that it is really a vague term, and for a benefit that is not easily accessed.
Many employers have tuition reimbursement as a benefit. The problem with this is that while it used to be a wonderful benefit for many, its value has gone down in recent years. Traditional colleges and universities are changing, especially with continuing education programs, and not everyone wants to get into a graduate school program, especially when they have families while working full-time. Not everyone needs a graduate degree, either – especially in software engineering.
Fortunately, software engineers – and all employees, really – have several options for growing aside from taking college courses. Many, however, are not free, and in fact can be costly. A company might pick up the tab, but this is rarely made clear in any kind of detail. And if a company wants to use professional development to lure new employees and keep their current ones, there is much work to be done.
The first area of work needed is in terms of what the possibilities are. Will a company pay for courses outside the scope of traditional colleges and universities, such as Udemy, Coursera or LinkedIn Learning? How about training run by a consultant, company or foundation? What about someone’s conference registration, so long as the conference is relevant to the employee’s everyday work? And would the company allow the employee to attend a conference without having to take PTO? What happens if a conference is out of town?
These are the kinds of questions whose answers are needed to provide clarity and get employees thinking about how they can utilize a professional development benefit. None of these are exceedingly difficult questions, but this is one thing that must be done. A lack of clarity helps no one.
There is a bigger obstacle than the lack of clarity, however. It is that employees generally may not feel like this benefit is really accessible to them – they may believe that if they ask for the company to support them in something like this, it will be shot down, no questions asked. In other words, employees essentially need to be given permission to ask for this and utilize it.
A big part of this can come from experience at a stingy employer. I once worked for a company where I felt like I was asking for the world when I asked if the company could pay my registration fee to a conference very much related to my work and at a discounted rate. It wasn’t until I had a great manager a couple of years ago that I finally started to realize I could ask for things like this. From casual conversations we had, she knew about many things I do outside the office such as trainings outside of colleges and universities as well as conferences. She brought up the possibility of the company paying for them, and even though some of this was quite cheap, the dollar amount didn’t matter so much as the principle of the company being willing to pay for them in the first place. It sent a message that the company very much wants me to grow if the avenue is viable.
Ever since then, I have felt like I can ask for things like outside technical training or other professional development activities. But the confidence to do this did not come easily. I am thankful for the manager I had who helped me realize this, and this also shines a light on the challenge with a benefit like this. This confidence has led me to do much more than this, and that can happen for other people as well.
A contributor to this is the fact that it is often people at the highest levels of companies that talk about this, these days usually in the context of a company’s retention challenges. While the company’s leadership sets the tone and is very important – in fact, even in a big company the engineering upper management is probably a lot more important to the quality of life on the job than you might think – when executives talk about this benefit being there, it can be dismissed by an individual contributor as being something they have heard before that isn’t real, especially when there is also the aforementioned lack of clarity on the details.
This is where the first line of management, and perhaps a level up from that, in organizations that have a few layers of management, really comes into play. It makes sense considering these are the people that employees have to ask for approval, but when this benefit is conveyed at that level and with some guidance, it comes off very differently. It comes off as your direct manager telling you that you can ask for this so that you can grow; it is basically an invitation.
One might argue that this should not be necessary, but nothing happens in a vacuum. It is no accident that many employees may feel like a benefit like this is not accessible to them. As such, if a company wants to make this a key part of their retention strategy and even a key incentive they sell potential new hires on, they should do their best to leave as few unanswered questions about it as possible. In so doing, employees can feel like this is available to them and use it, and the company can benefit from the goodwill this can engender, which is not only their goal but a real feeling when doing this, as well as the growth that comes from the activity.