Compensation, flexibility, mission: Tech workers say you’d better have it all.
A recent survey says 72% of tech workers are at least thinking about leaving their jobs.
Welcome back to Ask a Tech Worker. For each edition of this recurring feature, I’ve been chatting with tech professionals I meet in downtown San Francisco about some of the biggest workplace questions in the industry. Got an idea for a future question? Email me.
Money, mission and flexibility. That’s what tech workers want. And managers had better start paying attention, because according to one recent survey, 72% of tech workers are at least thinking about leaving their jobs. Last week, I asked tech workers I met in San Francisco whether they’d noticed a wave of turnover at work. No one I spoke with had seen an exodus of their colleagues, but some said company leaders were concerned about recruitment, retention or both.
HashiCorp, the $13 billion software-maker that went public in December, has seen turnover of longtime employees who were fully vested and ready to join a new startup, said Jack Huber, a senior deal analyst there whom I met walking around Salesforce Park. Other than that, Huber hasn’t noticed colleagues leaving.
Compensation is a major lever that companies in HashiCorp’s space use to recruit, but Huber said it’s only one piece of the puzzle.
“I think our company’s a little advantaged because people buy into what we’re doing, so I don’t know how important salary is relative to other factors,” Huber said. “Turnover is worse at companies where people don’t really want to be in the first place.”
That includes companies that are requiring employees to return to the office, said Huber, whose friends at other companies are seeing higher turnover because their employers require in-office work. HashiCorp, by contrast, allows its employees to work from anywhere.
Matthew Van Winkle, a customer success manager at Mixpanel, agreed: Both compensation and flexibility are key for attracting and retaining employees. Van Winkle hasn’t noticed much turnover since joining the product analytics software-maker in June, but said company leaders had “made it known that they’re worried about retention.”
“It’s kind of a race upward right now for recruiting, so comp keeps going up,” said Van Winkle, whose employer has around 300 employees. “It seems like the standard [at small startups] is full flexibility: whenever and wherever the employee would like to work.”
Going beyond the work-from-anywhere standard could help even more. The news about the ecommerce company Bolt adopting a four-day workweek “was circulated” among colleagues at Mixpanel, Van Winkle said.
“It seems like a lot of the tech companies are jostling around fringe benefits, which are nice,” Van Winkle said. “But if a company could do something big like four days, that’s something that nobody else offers. I wonder if more and more companies do big moves like that.”
Maybe big, radical flexibility moves will help. Either way, companies that can’t afford to compete for expensive tech talent might need to concentrate more on hiring in cheaper markets. That’s what I heard from Michael Giuliana, the co-founder and chief technology officer of the pre-seed software startup Core3D. The three-person company only plans to hire one or two employees this year, so Giuliana isn’t yet dealing with the day-to-day headache of recruitment, but said he’s watched one of his partners struggle to hire developers at his engineering agency.
“What they’re doing is going overseas now, primarily,” Giuliana said while having lunch at Salesforce Park. “They’re 30-, 40-people teams in different places, South America and Eastern Europe. He just can’t really find anyone locally that he can attract, I guess, to that type of work.”
Even as companies face unprecedented competition to hire tech talent, not all tech workers feel that the world is their oyster. Early-career engineers I met last week told me it can still be a challenge to get that first job out of school.
“I didn’t have an internship, so it was pretty rough. A lot of rejections,” said Daniel Escoto, a new University of California, Santa Cruz graduate who joined the audio workout company Perform as a software engineer last month. “A lot of new grads are desperate to get jobs.”
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But what else can it do?
By shifting listening to podcasts, Spotify aims to reduce the revenue share it has to fork over to music rights holders.
Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety’s first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
A growing number of artists are pulling their music from Spotify to protest its business relationship with Joe Rogan. Some subscribers have started to jump ship. And among Spotify staff, there’s growing discontent, as The Verge reported Thursday.
Despite all of this, there’s no indication of Spotify changing its tune, with The Verge reporting that Daniel Ek defended the Rogan deal in a company town hall, calling it critical to Spotify’s success. Ek’s argument, in a nutshell: Every streaming service carries the same music, making it easy for competitors like Amazon and Google to give their own services preferential treatment on their hardware products.
“There was really no reason for them to integrate our service,” Ek said in a transcript published by The Verge. “Their users weren’t necessarily demanding access to Spotify, either. They were demanding access to content.”
That’s not entirely wrong. Amazon Music, Apple Music and YouTube Music all carry more or less the same music catalog as Spotify’s, and the music industry has largely given up on exclusive album releases. In that context, exclusive podcasts can be a key differentiator.
Left unsaid during the leaked town hall was another aspect of this relationship: Spotify is in bed with Joe Rogan because streaming music is too damn cheap.
Music services have long struggled to pay those huge royalty checks their contracts with the music rights holders are calling for. Some have even argued that the deck is fundamentally stacked against the streaming media industry, and that music subscription services can never be profitable.
And there’s a big reason why Spotify isn’t generating profits: The price of music subscriptions hasn’t changed in 20 years.
So why can’t Spotify just raise prices like Netflix? Turns out comparing those two companies isn’t even in the apples vs. oranges territory, but more like adding meat to your fruit salad.
This has forced Spotify to get creative. The company has tried many things over the years to make more money.
But what else can Spotify do? It’s unlikely that Spotify would abandon that $10 price tag without industry-wide support. However, Mulligan thinks it can still tweak some nobs to make music streaming more profitable for everyone involved, labels and artists included.
Even so, it’s unlikely that raising the price of bundles would solve all of Spotify’s financial issues, which is why we will likely see more Joe Rogan-sized bets in the company’s future — even if that occasionally pisses off people like Neil Young.
“This is probably just an opening skirmish in what might be a much longer series of conflicts,” Miulligan said.
A version of this story also appeared in today’s Entertainment newsletter; subscribe here.
Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety’s first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
Like anything worthwhile, it takes work, lots of flexibility and a whole lot of trial and error.
Annette Reavis is chief people officer at Envoy, a workplace platform that helps modern workplaces manage hybrid work.
In November of last year, I started a new position at a company that creates great hybrid workplaces. Our San Francisco office has been open since last June, and our community is growing and thriving as we get to know each other. 30% are new hires like me.
We operate on two principles: 1) making workspaces where people feel safe and comfortable and 2) the belief that people do their best work together and in person. Bringing people together helps us flex our community-building skills. Plus, there’s power in gathering at the office a few times a week to collaborate, share and problem-solve.
But thanks to omicron, everything old is new again. We’re all experiencing the anxiety and frustration of having to mask up again and distance ourselves from friends and family. Many who’ve felt comfortable going into the office before this latest variant are choosing to stay at home. And experts expect this cyclical fluctuation of COVID-19 to continue.
A former colleague recently asked how I help my people cope. How do I nurture community and culture-building with COVID-19 always changing and disrupting plans?
Honestly, it’s not easy. It takes determination and trial and error. And most importantly, learning from those errors. Three things I stress with my people team: first, flexibility; second, a business plus mentality; and third, work-life blend.
In December, we asked office workers across the country how their companies could do better during this pandemic. What would empower them as employees? Which benefits, if any, would impact whether they stay or go?
The results show that the greatest desire of employees isn’t a defined mission or greater investments in career growth. Most (63%) want more flexibility. Nearly half agree that the freedom to split time between the workplace and home and the ability to choose which days to come in are extremely important, right up there with traditional work benefits like matching 401k plans or paid time off.
The concept of flex work isn’t new, but its widespread adoption is. Flex work helps all of us find some semblance of control in the middle of an uncontrollable pandemic. Giving options makes people happier and less stressed. This leads to a greater desire to participate, which helps us build our communities and culture.
At Envoy, we’re all about hybrid and flexible work, though we also realize the need to be flexible within our flexibility based on what’s happening with the virus. For example, we recently reassessed and relaxed a two-day per week in-office policy because of the omicron surge. Health and safety come first.
Business plus small talk is a concept I’ve started to push from the top down because socializing helps us cope. Pre-pandemic, it was easier to engage and connect on a personal level when we worked in the office. It was organic. We spent time chatting and hearing the latest from our colleagues — their vacation to Hawaii or how their eldest is off to college.
But in isolation for nearly two years, we’ve lost a sense of community, cut off from extended family, friends and work life. And we’re out of practice when it comes to chit-chat and watercooler talk because it’s harder to do over Zoom. On Zoom, we tend to get down to the business of getting work done.
Don’t mistake me: doing business is a priority, but our interactions shouldn’t be just about work or even productivity. Taking a few minutes to ask your co-workers about how things are going, however brief, matters. Why? Because it’s how we’re built. We remember those who’ve shared and whom we’ve shared with. Touchpoints help us develop rapport, which builds stronger relationships that help us do good cross-functional work.
Work-life balance assumes everything should be equal. It never is. When I was at Facebook, there were days I had a deadline, which meant I might not make dinner with my boys. But I also never missed that soccer game at three in the afternoon. Work-life blend is about the in-the-moment trade-offs and choices we all have to make everyday. Does work come first in this moment, or is it family? Do I go into the office on Tuesday and Thursday so I’m free to pick up the kids the rest of the week? My job is to help people recognize these choices, the potential trade-offs, and the flexibility they may already have, especially now.
Finally, I’m helping to build great workplaces that people love. This is arguably one of the most important ways to help people get through this pandemic. I have confidence in the physical workplace for many reasons. One of the most compelling is that people crave it, and will continue to gravitate to it. If given the choice, 66% of office workers would choose to work mostly in-office. Only 12% would prefer to work remotely all of the time. In addition, 48% say impromptu run-ins and actual face time with colleagues is what excites them when thinking about going into the office. 47% just want to get out of the house! I can relate.
Annette Reavis is chief people officer at Envoy, a workplace platform that helps modern workplaces manage hybrid work.
The signs have been out there for a while, but Facebook users have now declined for the first time ever.
It’s the beginning of the end of Facebook.
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol’s editorial director. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Facebook is dying. The signs have been out there for a while, of course: slowing growth around the world, an increased focus on Instagram and WhatsApp and Messenger and then a hard pivot toward the metaverse, including a whole-ass name change so that Meta’s potential might not be brought down by Facebook. But all we saw until now was slow growth, not decline.
Facebook users have now declined for the first time ever, Meta announced on its earnings call yesterday. The numbers are still ludicrous, obviously — 1.929 billion people still log on to the Facebook app every day, and Meta turned nearly $40 billion in profit last year, so don’t pour one out for the blue app just yet — but the number is down about a half a million users from the previous three months.
Meta’s stock has dropped about 20% since the earnings call. Big price swings have come for Meta before, but this one’s particularly problematic: Zuckerberg needs time, money and patience to pull off his metaverse play, and he may not have as much of any of the three as he thought.
Facebook is playing with both hands tied behind its back right now. TikTok is a formidable competitor, but Facebook can’t even buy a GIF company without getting antitrust scrutiny. Apple’s privacy moves continue to hurt, too: “The accuracy of our ads targeting decreased, which increased the cost of driving outcomes,” Sheryl Sandberg said on the earnings call, and Zuckerberg added that the company has had to rebuild “a lot of our ads infrastructure.” Ultimately, CFO Dave Wehner said, that could cost the company about $10 billion in lost revenue — which is about as much as Meta lost on all its metaverse projects last year.
Reels is the bright spot, at least until the metaverse becomes a thing. Zuckerberg underscored how important Reels is to the company as it tries to take on TikTok, and called it “our fastest-growing content format by far.”
Meta has been the most interesting company in earnings season so far. The sun rises, Big Tech makes money. But here are a few things we’ve learned from the other companies reporting:
This year, it seems, is going to be a year full of transition. The ad market continues to change; the supply chain should improve eventually; the digital transformations of so many industries continue apace; regulation is coming; the (hopefully, please, seriously) end of the pandemic will bring a sweep of change in everyone’s lives. Even the biggest companies won’t be immune to the change. But all that money they keep making will surely help.
A version of this story also appeared in today’s Source Code newsletter; subscribe here.
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol’s editorial director. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Talking with Andrew Moore, Google Cloud’s VP and GM for AI, reveals a disconnect between Google’s bold plan for a government AI data cloud and an academic’s goals for collaborative, global AI research.
One of Andrew Moore’s most important and visible tasks involves defining what a national AI research cloud might look like.
Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of “Campaign ’08: A Turning Point for Digital Media,” a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.
It’s nothing new to hear Google executives talk about happenings inside different divisions of the company as though they’re separate entities. But when the head of Google Cloud AI talks about the company’s detailed proposal for a government AI project that he is closely involved in as though it were conjured up in some distant universe, it’s confusing, to say the least.
In this case, that executive is Andrew Moore, Google Cloud’s vice president and general manager for AI and Industry Solutions. An academic at heart, Moore is reluctant to speak as a Googler when it comes to the company’s plan for a federally funded AI research cloud. But his arms’ length separation from the company’s proposal reveals that Google views it just as much a political gambit as a cloud-services sales call to the government.
Moore was a computer science professor at world-renowned AI research university Carnegie Mellon before first joining Google in 2006 to head up its Pittsburgh engineering office. A fish out of water, perhaps, he returned in 2014 to the university as the dean of its School of Computer Science.
Now, Moore is back at Google; he still works from his digs in Pittsburgh, the city he calls “the center of the world for the most advanced forms of robotics and mathematical AI.” And although Moore was born in England and has a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, some say his accent has morphed over the years into something that sounds a bit less British and a bit more mid-Atlantic.
The ecosystem Moore is immersed in now that he’s back corporate-side — Moore has had no affiliation with Carnegie Mellon since he rejoined Google in 2019 — is one very familiar to an AI researcher: the cloud. At Google, Moore helps customers coax their machine-learning prototypes into active algorithmic systems operating in the wild. Those projects, like the academic research that gave birth to today’s productized cloud-based AI tools, require massive amounts of computing power and data, and that’s what the cloud is all about.
Right now, one of Moore’s most important and visible tasks involves defining what a possible national AI research cloud might look like. That involves deciding who will provide cloud services to AI researchers in the U.S., and how.
Google has particularly bold ideas about how this would-be National AI Research Resource might be built and how the company should be involved. The thing is, even though Moore is helping determine what the resource could be, he said he had nothing to do with the company’s proposal for it.
“My role is as a commissioner on this panel … The panel did a request for information from a whole bunch of companies. And Google was one of the companies that responded, but I was not the author of that,” he said regarding the proposal for the controversial project. “My role within the commission was watching what many stakeholders — not just the cloud companies — but also other smaller and [medium-sized] companies are saying.”
There’s little question that the modern world of data and AI driven by cloud computing requires a new approach to advanced research.
“There is an old-fashioned way of thinking of doing these very data intensive bits of research, which is, you put some servers in your laboratory, your lab at the university, and you download a whole bunch of data. And you do your work there, and you’ve got your grad students and yourself sitting there warmed by your servers, sitting next to you humming away,” he said.
That on-campus server scenario has become more and more rare, of course. “So as a dean, I would have new faculty members coming to me. When they’re talking about their startup packages, they would talk about, ‘Well, I need such and such a number of servers with this much disk space to operate.’ But as time has gone by, that’s turned into folks saying, ‘I need cloud credits.’”
A federal AI cloud and data repository could be a game-changer for academic researchers, but Google seems to recognize the political implications, too. Indeed, according to Moore, it was the company’s public policy team, its government affairs division, that put together Google’s NAIRR proposal. A Google Cloud spokesperson clarified that the document was drafted by “many teams at Google that care about the success of the task force,” but did not provide the names of those teams. Google Cloud does have a team dedicated to managing work for public-sector clients, for example.
Moore is Google Cloud’s top AI executive, but he distanced himself from that role when answering Protocol’s questions about Google’s approach to the NAIRR initiative. For instance, rather than explain why Google wants to partner in the project with AWS, Microsoft and other cloud providers, companies it competes with in the cutthroat cloud industry, he said, “I’m not going to talk about Google specifically, like it’s particularly different from the others.”
Instead, the on-again, off-again university educator emphasized the lack of computing power and data resources available to academic AI researchers, and lamented the lure of corporate work. “Many of those academics, they look around, and they see opportunities for themselves in industry, doing perhaps closed research, where they would be able to get more done, but it’s less useful for the country as a whole. So it’s incredibly important — and this is something where you will see agreement throughout the commercial world in the United States — it’s incredibly important that we support academic researchers,” he said.
Although Moore does not consider himself a Google mouthpiece in his position as a NAIRR task force member, he and the company have highlighted some of the very same data-security, quality and access issues.
“This is a very tough thing,” said Moore during an October NAIRR meeting. He was talking about the risk of data exfiltration, when an authorized person extracts data from a secured system and shares it with unauthorized third parties or moves it to an insecure place.
“I think this committee has a really big decision,” he continued, discussing the types of data and level of data granularity that could be available in the national research hub.
“If we’re going to do controlled data, which does not allow exfiltration, that means a lot of work by us, like tens of millions of dollars possibly of software engineering or contracts to someone to set that up. I’m on the fence between them. I could say, ‘Let’s just go with safe old geology and weather and outdoor natural scenes with faces blurred and keep our life simple.’ Or I could say, ‘No, obviously if you’re going to work on diseases or something like that, you need patient data protected against exfiltration.’ We’ve got a big, and, I think, momentous decision here, because I don’t think this exfiltration limitation thing is a small side issue for us.”
Google’s public policy team had something similar on its mind in its proposal to the task force. “Before making Google datasets publicly available for the open-source community, we spend hundreds of hours standardizing data and validating quality,” the company wrote in its response to a request for information by the task force. “This expensive error prone process, which is repeated for each analysis, not only becomes a barrier to the use of data, but also leads to problems of reproducibility in research questions,” it said, adding that “the success of a research initiative potentially involving sensitive data depends upon the ability to reliably credential users and provide granular access management.”
No worries, Google seemed to imply in its submission. Not only would the company take on the arduous task of preparing raw data flowing into the research cloud, but it would do it for free. Some have questioned Google’s motivations, arguing that getting first dibs on the raw data could grant the company privileged access to valuable information others wouldn’t see.
In his interview with Protocol, Moore said Google’s proposal presents “a very legitimate concern that there’s an attempt to sort of control data like this.” However, he said, “There would be a bit more concern if we were in some world without any data rights, or discussion of data security: [if] a commercial company was licensed to take all this data, do what it wants with it and then put up its own interpretation of that data publicly.”
The NAIRR task force was established on recommendation from the National Security Commission on AI, which warned that without a full-fledged national effort to advance AI research in the U.S., the country could lose its leadership position in AI to China, becoming more vulnerable to AI-enabled threats. However, Moore downplayed the notion of an “AI race” between the U.S. and China.
“There’s many notions of winning AI. Just as with the aerospace industry, or the cybersecurity industry, or quantum, or in the early days of engine manufacture, you’re going to see international competition,” he said. “And it absolutely is the case that the U.S. funding agencies are inspired by helping keep the United States at the forefront in most areas of science and technology.”
Being at the forefront of science is one thing, but some— including people in military, cyber and data security, intellectual property law or civil and human rights arenas — believe the risk of China dominating AI advancements poses a grave threat that ought to limit collaboration in AI research and business activity between the two countries.
Moore, a scientist at his core — his Twitter bio reads, “I love Algorithms” — doesn’t see it that way.
“Among academia, for example, you will see plenty of cases where there are mutually supportive, friendly, creative bits of joint work going on between different countries. And so, I want to be clear that this national security commission was not indicating that there should be no joint AI research between continents,” he said. “I think it’s actually considered to be a strong benefit and a chance to sort of bring people together if there is collaboration between different researchers in this area.”
Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of “Campaign ’08: A Turning Point for Digital Media,” a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.
Rebekah Rombom at Flatiron School shared best practices for deploying education benefits that tech workers actually want to engage with.
Offering education benefits is a critical way to retain and promote the best employees.
Amber Burton (@amberbburton) is a reporter at Protocol. Previously, she covered personal finance and diversity in business at The Wall Street Journal. She earned an M.S. in Strategic Communications from Columbia University and B.A. in English and Journalism from Wake Forest University. She lives in North Carolina.
Very early in my career, one of my former employers quietly offered its staffers the opportunity to sign up for an online course to learn Python. The company was paying for it, yes, but there was little information about the time commitment or what a person could do if they actually learned Python. Needless to say, I did not sign up for the course, and I do not know Python. Cue Marlon Brando:“I coulda been a contender!”
My personal regrets aside, Rebekah Rombom, the chief business development officer at Flatiron School, said this is the wrong way to go about offering education to workers. The Flatiron School has made a name for itself over the past decade by training and retraining professionals in software engineering, data science, product design and cybersecurity — some of the most in-demand skills in the tech industry today.
For Rombom, who works with Flatiron’s corporate partners, the secret to getting employees to upskill, reskill and engage with education benefits is all about providing awareness and setting expectations. In today’s competitive market for tech talent, offering education benefits is a critical way to retain and promote the best employees. Rombom spoke with Protocol about the current landscape of education benefits and what HR managers should consider when deploying these programs.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How has the demand for training to upskill and reskill employees shifted over the past two to three years?
What we see companies really wanting to do is either supercharge employee engagement across different sub-goals — recruit, retain, engage, increase employee satisfaction — or fill in-demand roles in the targeted way. These technical roles that we train for are some of the hardest to fill [and the] most competitive in the market, with a wide gap between talent supply and employer demand. And in addition to companies who are looking for ways to engage and retain their employees, we’ve also seen companies say, “Hey, I have these really hard-to-fill roles, and are there folks internally that could be repositioned?”
What are you seeing in terms of the amount of time and support that companies are allowing for their employees to grasp difficult subjects?
We have coaches and instructors who work directly with students, both one-on-one and in small groups and in a class setting. And their job is to help folks navigate through the material in whatever way will help them grasp it best … And so for an organization, a lot of companies have seen a ton of value in that. You can give your employees content, but if you’re really looking to make a transformational change, part of that experience is often a guide, a coach and instructor to help you through understanding the content.
We have been running a program in partnership with Amazon where we are retraining warehouse associates for careers in software engineering and cybersecurity. The first round of that program wrapped up late last year with over 270 graduates, warehouse associates that now have the skills to start careers in cybersecurity or software engineering. These are folks with full-time jobs. All of those graduates I just mentioned worked full-time hours at an Amazon facility, so we had to structure a program in partnership with Amazon that would work for those people’s lives.
It was 10 months, part-time learning that folks could fit into their work schedule. It had both a large self-driven component where there’s content you can access at any time and instructor support that was flexible and could work with your schedule. So things like lectures you could pop in to and conversations with peers and teachers. I think that’s one of the benefits of working with an organization that does this.
We’ve seen students already start their new cybersecurity and software engineering careers, both inside and outside of Amazon, which is really exciting.
What do you tell executives who are weighing the pros and cons and the reality that once you arm people with new skills, they might not stay?
I think it depends on the company’s goals. So for a company that’s looking to attract, engage and retain over a couple-year period, retraining frontline workers for new skills and then giving an opportunity to path into a new job at the company, or start their new career elsewhere, might be a really good option. For a company that’s looking to in a very targeted way transition existing employees into high-demand roles inside that company, we would recommend a different kind of program, something that’s maybe smaller and more tailored to the technical skills specifically at that organization.
What are some best practices that HR managers should consider to make sure employees are engaging with their education benefits and also finishing the program?
One thing is awareness and inviting people into the experience. We’ve worked with a lot of students over the years who have really different backgrounds than what has traditionally been considered a technology worker. So inviting folks in to participate in the tech workforce I think is one really important part, and making folks aware that these pathways exist.
And then [No. 2] is expectation-setting. This experience is hard and requires dedication. It’s pretty uncomfortable to learn an entirely new set of skills that you don’t have, and it requires openness and vulnerability and a lot of hard work. Making people aware of that in the beginning profoundly helps set them on a productive course through something that’s going to be kind of a bumpy ride. When we’re engaging in these conversations, organizations already know that they’re going to need to identify the time and get manager support, and I think that’s what HR and learning and development teams tend to be really good at.
Amber Burton (@amberbburton) is a reporter at Protocol. Previously, she covered personal finance and diversity in business at The Wall Street Journal. She earned an M.S. in Strategic Communications from Columbia University and B.A. in English and Journalism from Wake Forest University. She lives in North Carolina.
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