[IpV8]

We like to encourage developers to go for certifications in the technologies that we use (AWS certifications, Snowflake certifications, etc). Our vizualization folks get Tableau and PowerBI certified. We also have some Tableau admin certified people. This way you have a measurable qualifier that someone is training in a relevant skillset. We allow developers to spend a certain number of hours per year on training, and reward them with raises (500 or 1000 dollars per year) when they achieve their certification. We are flexible about what certs people go after (as long as they are relevant to the business). We also try to send people to conferences hosted by the relevant company once they pass the exam (re-invent for example).

[IpV8]

I forgot to answer your other question about tracking employee engagement. We make people track their work down to the 15 minute increment, and make sure they hit specific allocations per project exactly. We also micromanage their tasks in Jira so all of the time tracking lines up to tickets.

For the love of god do not do this. Engineers hate this and flee from it in droves.

[derision]

I'm definitely not interested in micromanaging, I just want to have some way to measure the effectiveness of the program. Certifications makes a whole lot of sense, because there's a required exam.

[MonaroVXR]

I get it where you are heading, but I'm more a "showoff" person. I can talk about the things I have done and things that I want to learn and definitely need to learn.

If you look at my GitHub, there are some things missing, like CI/CD, MSFTStudy with powershell, AWS and Azure things.

I follow the books that have exams in them, but I don't the exams.