[MattGrommes]

A lot of companies will pay for at least part of whatever college classes you take, without auditing whether or not it would be good for your specific job.

I encourage people to look into it, it's a benefit a lot of people have but don't use and it's leaving money on the table.

[shortrounddev2]

Every company I ever worked for constrained it in many ways

1. Masters degree only, they won't pay for anyone to get a bachelor's or associates

2. Must maintain a B average or better

3. Cannot take any time off, it has to be entirely on nights and weekends

4. Reimbursement after the fact, so you're taking on the initial financial risk up front.

[ponector]

I had a job with an education budget listed as benefits.

However, to use it there are constraints: 1. The topic should be related to technologies used by company. Cannot get a Google cloud certification as they are using aws. 2. To get it you need approval by line manager, hr, and director of the office. 3. If it is more than €250 you need to sign up loyalty agreement for a year. Meaning if you will return some amount of you quit.

With all that strings attached it is just a marketing bullshit to attract new hires.

[zelphirkalt]

Plus usually the employer wants it to be related to ones job, from their very limited perspective of the world and management decisions. For example I couldn't even take a language course for education vacation, as the employer did not make any use of my language skills.

[dominicq]

Can you say more? What kind of company would so such a thing? Maybe I live in a bubble but that's so far outside of what I've seen that it just sounds fantastical.

[MattGrommes]

Ok, both of these comments made me doubt my memory so I just checked and my current employer, a very large consumer company, and the limits of the program are that you get a C or above, and the class is "related" to your job or any job you can get at the company. But I've gotten classes paid for that only tangentially related to my job with no problem. So I concede that you might not get a biology degree as an engineer but my particular company does a lot of different things so my guess is in practice you'd have no problems. I also worked at a now-defunct mid-size startup and a hospital system with similarly loose requirements but I don't have access to their docs anymore.

[Suppafly]

My company uses guildeducation.com and we can use basically $5k a year (I think, it might be semester), a lot of if it is just individual classes, but there are also some degree programs. I don't know if they preselect which courses are available to us or if we have access to the whole catalog. I suspect it's somewhat curated, because we are a medical company and most of it is medical stuff. There is a CS bachelor's program but last I checked there wasn't an MS CS program.

[fouc]

I would assume most companies with 100+ office workers (essentially big enough for an HR department) usually offer something like this in western countries.