Company Sponsored Learning & Development must be Employee-Centric

As a young engineer, I worked in research & development for the Department of Defense. The government offers many higher education opportunities through a variety of educational partners. As an employee benefit, I studied part-time to earn my Master of Science in Management over a two-year period. Every week, I attended class, completed assignments, and took tests because the government paid for it, and because I could.

I completed the program with a nearly perfect GPA and for two consecutive years I was nominated for student of the year. To this day, I could not tell you the name of any professor or any concept I learned that helped my career. I can tell you, however, that the government spent $60,142 to get me this degree. I remember this number specifically because I transferred departments during my last semester and was forced to pay to complete my degree due to an administrative error.

The original HR manager who told me that transferring within the organization would not affect the benefit had left for another job. I spent half of the semester fighting with the administration to get reimbursed, showing my direct manager emails and transcripts from logged phone calls, all to no avail. I pulled from my signing bonus to finish the degree but walked away from the experience having been the victim of two systematic, yet fairly common problems.

First, the process for getting approval and tracking the degree was broken and difficult from an administrative standpoint — not to mention you don’t get credit for pursuing advanced development until you can log completion into the government’s system.

Second, I was not proud to be a part of the educational institution I received a degree from, and even also frustrated that taxpayer dollars were being wasted in this system. To this day, I do not list the degree on my LinkedIn profile. I completed the degree because I could, not because I was proud and thought it would actually help me — I had no choice in what I pursued.

Only recently has L&D become part of the conversation for figuring out how to keep employees engaged and happy — attracting the best talent is no longer about beer kegs in the snack room and napping pods in the loft. The key to engaging employees lies in their demand for frictionless and employee-centric upskilling opportunities.

Employees with a growth mindset are either earning or learning. Unless your salaries are comparable to that of Amazon or Google, your best talent is looking to learn. Driven employees are also resourceful and willing continue to find ways to improve even when the job is not as engaging.

Companies can no longer find the best resources for their people. It’s always been wishful thinking to believe that all employees can learn what they need to in the same format, and all have high levels of engagement. Development tools for every level, at any stage are available, from online and in person courses, to conferences, to coaching services.

The true value in what people spend time on is determined by the individual, and only by the individual. Unless there’s a shiny Ivy League degree at the end of a slog of coursework, people still want to be able to enjoy as they upskill. It’s proven that people learn what they are interested in.

After three more years with the government, I enrolled in the two-year full-time MBA program at Columbia Business School. Columbia was always my first choice for graduate school, and, although the tuition cost was similar to that of my other Master’s degree, it wasn’t an option for the government to pay for it, and so I moved on. I invested in myself in a program I had an affinity for and never looked back.

People need to be empowered to make their own decisions as to how and where they want to spend their time learning new skills. It is simply wasted dollars if someone is not proud of the degree.

It’s never been easy to hand educational opportunities to someone with the hopes of it fitting perfectly into their long-term goals — employers are just admitting this now. Employees have been asking for learning & development opportunities, but they are asking to be empowered and trusted to select their own paths. If companies want to retain driven individuals and gain brand value across the workforce, they should be wise enough to give them everything they want.