Course Tuition Reimbursement Information: Fill & Download for Free

Both Google and Microsoft make the following resources available to their employees:Internal in-person and recorded training courses on technical subjects like C++ and non-technical subjects like conflict management.Tuition reimbursement for external training programs, both job-related and not.Internal book lending libraries and reimbursement for book purchasesReimbursement for attending external conferencesInternal online training programs in specific systems. Google has a cool kind of documentation called “codelabs” that walk you through a “hello world” project in a system to help you learn it. Codelabs exist for many different technologies and languages.Formal and informal peer mentoringManager support for learning on the job, often by gradually increasing complexity of work. A critical part of the manager’s job is to help the employee learn and grow. At both companies, growing your employees’ skills and getting them promoted is one of the main things a manager must demonstrate to be promoted themselves.

There are a few different types of direct reimbursement employee benefits:1. Dental / Medical / Vision Reimbursement2. HSA Plans3. Tuition ReimbursementOn Medical/Dental/Vision/HSAThe plans are generally packaged in with benefits providers offerings, who oftentimes will have either homegrown or outsourced solutions. There are many providers. This is a nice aggregator for HSA information.On Tuition ReimbursementUnlike the above, we’ve found tuition reimbursement programs are oftentimes managed in house by either the finance team or the HR/operations team. This can be a headache for tracking, taxes, & financial management. Also employees don’t usually have a clear direction of what will be reimbursed and what won’t.That’s why we created TuitionSafe, a cloud-based platform that removes the headache from tuition reimbursement & also curates courses from top providers personalized to each company. This gives the company an added boost by solving immediate training needs all in one.

Over the past few decades, employers have dramatically shifted their attitudes toward employees. Today, most corporate executives and business owners will give the same answer if asked to describe their workforce: they’ll say payroll is their biggest expense.This may be true, but it reveals that their employees aren’t an investment: they’re basically a drain on potential profits. A necessary evil.Once upon a time, employers valued their workforce as the engine driving the business. Each employee’s professional trajectory was anticipated and enabled by employers, and those who wished could join a firm out of school and eventually retire from a single employer. A job meant you could afford to own a home, provide comfortably for a family, and live well.The seminal example is Eastman Kodak — virtually every person who lived in Rochester, NY (Kodak’s global headquarters) either worked for the company, was related to an employee or depended on Kodak employees to provide revenue for their businesses.In the early ‘80s, a janitor at Eastman Kodak would earn around $16/hour (adjusted to 2018 dollars).Janitors were full-time employees of Kodak; they received four weeks of paid vacation like every other Kodak employee, as well as a generous bonus paid each year in March to the entire workforce.Employees were pushed by managers to take advantage of Kodak’s tuition assistance program, which paid for training, classes, college courses and obtaining advanced degrees. The company had no requirements for the education to be job-related or beneficial to Kodak.One janitor at Kodak in the ‘80s was named Gail Evans. She had been cleaning Building 326 on the corporate campus for a few years, until the company decided to shutter that office. Evans wasn’t fired.She was a valued asset, and all workers in the closed building found new jobs within Kodak. The ethos and corporate culture — give employees skills, then advance them where those skills are valuable — meant Evans wasn’t limited to janitorial work, or unskilled jobs.Kodak trained Evans to be a film-cutter, which is a skilled trade. She moved upward.Managers knew which parts of the business were growing or in high demand, and at the time Kodak was selling a lot of high end 70mm film and processing "theatrical prints" of Hollywood movies: a print is a copy of the film master cut into reels, which are sent to theaters and projected on the screen.They taught her, then advanced her to a position that utilized what she'd learned.While working full-time, Evans took night school classes (paid by Kodak) to learn how to create spreadsheets using the curious new devices called “personal computers” that were starting to show up in accounting and distribution in big companies.Her manager — following the corporate culture of engaged management and being proactive in advancing their employees’ — knew she was learning about PCs and spreadsheets, and asked Evans if she could teach other employees how to use spreadsheet software to track inventory.She did, and when she graduated from (Kodak-sponsored) college in 1987, the company promoted her to join Kodak’s IT department.Evans new job was a career-track information technology professional — the company groomed employees at this level to develop the skills and knowledge they’d need as Kodak executives.The career track to the top of Kodak’s org chart wasn’t a pipe dream or an empty promise: it was the default assumption. Put in the time and effort, get promoted, develop skills, join the leadership. Duh.Within a decade, Gail Evans was named Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Eastman Kodak’s global operations. She eventually moved on to larger executive roles at even bigger companies, and by every measure lived the American Dream.Starting as a janitor and becoming CTO for one of the biggest companies in the world was only possible because Kodak paid her well, provided generous benefits, and (most importantly) fostered a culture where managers had an obligation to move people upward and train them so they had the skills to succeed.Kodak's management style is all but forgotten in corporate America today: managers were trained to identify opportunities for their employees; recognize under-utilized skills and find ways to utilize them; and open doors to everyone.Once upon a time, a janitor could become a film-cutter if given the chance and training under good managers. And a film-cutter could learn to operate corporate IT systems, which means in time they could be the person in charge of an entire corporate IT division.A janitor doesn't become CTO by force of will, and this isn't a natural career path. But when a company treats every employee with respect and promotes a culture of growth, opportunity and employees as investments, the path upward reveals itself: unskilled worker becomes skilled. Skilled becomes specialized. Specialized becomes professional. Professional become executive and a leader is made.(The story above owes much to this excellent article in the New York Times: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now)Kodak was one of the biggest companies in the world 35 years ago.Today, its equivalent is Apple. Apple dominates the smallish Bay Area city of Cupertino, CA, where its HQ has been since the beginning. Apple pays its professionals well, and provides stock options to many worth a ton.But while many businesses and non-Apple employees inside Cupertino depend on Apple and Apple employees to earn a living, Apple has very little civic integration with Cupertino and the city’s leaders.Steve Jobs famously appeared before the Cupertino City Council, where he presented early concepts for the company’s planned giant ‘Ring’ HQ expansion. Jobs described the wonders of the $5 billion expansion, which covers 175 acres of Cupertino.When Jobs finished, a traffic consultant for Cupertino warned that the impact on traffic from 12,000 employees hadn’t been considered by Apple’s architects. He predicted catastrophic traffic jams, dangerous burdens on the adjacent Highway 280 on-ramps, and heavy burdens on the city infrastructure that would require issuance of bonds or higher taxes to cover.The City Council told Jobs that Apple needed to fix the traffic problems and present them with a revised design before the city would approve it.Steve Jobs, in his last public appearance before his death, told the City Council that if Cupertino didn’t like his building, Apple would leave Cupertino and find a city that did.Cupertino dropped the matter, and taxpayers will bear the burden of repairing city infrastructure that Apple could have preserved by changing the configuration of its employee parking lots. Steve Jobs said no. Apple, unlike Kodak, saw its power and influence in their HQ city as a weapon: give us what we want, or lose everything.This hardball mindset may make Apple a trillion dollar company, but nobody will be telling stories 40 years from now about Apple's legendary civic involvement. And they won't have any stories about janitors becoming chief executives. Here's why:Janitorial staff at Apple actually earn the same as Kodak’s janitors did, $16.10 an hour. But janitorial services are contracted through an outside company, so janitors aren’t Apple employees.Apple awards the service contract to the lowest bidder, so the company that employs Apple’s janitors offers them no vacations, no vacation pay, no tuition reimbursement, no chance for opportunities within Apple, and absolutely no job security.They are invisible, replaceable and an expense to be minimized. If Apple managers aren't even aware of janitors as individual people, they aren't spending any time finding them new opportunities.The janitors, to be fair, do have a path to higher pay: Those who work a certain number of hours and miss zero shifts will eventually qualify for their pay to jump from $16.10 to $16.60 per hour.That's an advancement horizon of 50 cents. Before taxes. Just don't get sick or miss your bus, and the world is your janitorial oyster.