How these 9 hiring companies are investing in continuing education for their teams

As technology evolves, so must technologists.

If a company wants to stay competitive, it’s imperative that its employees stay up to date with the latest trends and developments, as well as learn new skills and expand their knowledge. This benefits not only the companies, but the individuals as well, since they can use that continued growth to progress their careers. With this hunger for learning, many jobseekers are now looking for employers to support their continuing education. In turn, employers are establishing and formalizing programs to do so.

For the month of July, Technical.ly’s reporting has explored the theme of tech education for our editorial calendar. For some additional perspectives, we asked our Technical.ly Talent companies the following question:

How does your org support continuing education for employees? 

This could include things like subsidizing participation in graduate degree or professional certification courses, establishing peer mentorship and learning groups, providing resources to help employees stay up to date on skills and languages, hosting guest speakers or less formal programs like lunch-and-learns, etc.

Here are some replies from their hiring teams, and if you like what you see, follow the links to companies’ Culture Pages to learn more and explore open roles.

Fastmail

“At Fastmail, every staffer has their own professional development budget, and we encourage them to use it on their education. We’ve supported certificate programs in UX, content creation, leadership and more. All our new people managers take a course on resilient management, and we hold biweekly groups for them to share their experiences and learn from each other. All new developers get a book to encourage them to expand the programming languages they know. We host the (returning) Philly Javascript meetup, and an internal tech meetup called TFCon. Our support team does peer coaching, to improve both the skills of their role and their teaching ability.” — Helen Horstmann-Allen, chief operating officer

Guru

“Guru supports continuing education by providing an annual professional development stipend to all employees as well as a tuition reimbursement program. We’ve held internal mentoring programs and launched peer learning groups that included an end-of-program reward for obtaining a new or advanced certification.” — Alicia Agnew, people operations manager

Kleer

“We understand the value in supporting our employees as they continue their education through training and certifications, as well as professional and personal development courses.

We offer a comprehensive suite of over 5,000 professional development courses and 25,000 e-books through our LMS at no-cost to our employees. These courses cover everything from learning new technologies and compliance to leadership and communication. Kleer also offers complimentary courses through our employee marketplace where team members can explore new hobbies or tackle burnout through yoga and meditation. There are even courses available to our kids through our online code academy.

We also celebrate learning opportunities within Kleer that include our onboarding training, peer shadowing and encouraging the chance to work cross functionally with other departments.” — Melissa Richardson, VP of team success

PNC Financial Services

“We are committed to developing our employees, growing their skills and supporting those who want to pursue new opportunities within our company. Through PNC University (PNCU), we offer our employees more than 50,000 learning and development opportunities through a wide variety of modalities, including in the classroom, on-the-job and online via iLearn, PNCU’s learning experience platform.” — Megan Schulenburg, senior learning and development director

SmartLogic

“We practice continuing education at both a company and individual level. Individually, each team member participates in a monthly professional development day. Since everyone needs to grow differently, these days are personalized toward a team member’s goals and career trajectory. As a team, we attend events to learn from others, like the ElixirConf later this summer in Colorado. We also meet monthly to focus on management training and hear talks on topics like how to give and receive feedback, conducting 1:1s and psychological safety.” — Yair Flicker, president

Springboard Collaborative

“Springboard provides all employees a personal and professional development stipend of $2,000 annually. How you spend this is totally up to you — anything from attending conferences and trainings to attending fitness classes or learning a new language! We are committed to investing in the ongoing development of team members both personally and professionally.” — Benjamin Kitchens, associate director of talent acquisition

Think Company

“Supporting continuing education for Thinkers has always been a priority for us, as ‘continuously improve’ is one of our six core values. Each employee is given an accruing personal training budget to attend conferences, take classes, purchase books and pursue other professional education. We host internal events all year that are based in knowledge sharing — discipline interest groups (DIGs), educational cohorts, workshops, talks, lunch ‘n’ learns and work shares, among many others. Lastly, company managers work directly with individuals to identify where areas of interest align with business needs and offer Thinkers custom support with learning new skills.” — Suzanne Cotter, director of marketing and communications

URBN

“At URBN we support continuing education by meeting the employee where they are. We provide access to a vast library of self-led on-demand courses, work with internal subject matter experts to design URBN-specific training programs and create cohorts of learners from across the organization to build skills and community. We have multiple touchpoints with our employees so we can better understand what they need and align our trainings to their unique professional development goals, creating the most impactful experience. The URBN Tech group makes it easy; the leaders are very passionate about supporting their teams and do an amazing job of working with the HR and talent development teams to help employees gain new skills.” — URBN talent development team

Wilco

“The electronic security sector is easily one of the most underrated innovative and high tech sectors right now. We provide continued technology training for the electronic security cloud platforms we offer and provide services to our clients. The technology and features update and change very often. Every quarter there is new technology that we send our team members to in person to update skill sets that include integration/installation as well as sales and market development.” — Brigitte Daniel-Corbin, chief executive officer

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Want to learn more? Check out all the Technical.ly Talent companies here, and find out about their cultures and open positions.

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