Learning and Development

Continuous learning and professional development are incredibly important at Glitch. We support our employees in their quest for knowledge in 3 primary ways: Conferences, Mentorship and Friday Talks. Ask us about tuition reimbursement!

For the most current info on L&D at Glitch, head over to the Learning and Development Hub Lock. You can see who is attending what conferences this year and what Friday Talks are upcoming!

Additionally, use these slack channels (#conferences, #mentorship and #learning) to discuss any of these policies with fellow teammates.

Conferences



At a glance

  • Glitch employees have $3500 and three (3) conference/education days at their disposal each year. This may be used to cover travel, lodging, fees, and materials for the conference. If it's something that will make your conference experience better, use this allowance! Speak with your team lead prior to booking to get approval for your conference. Refer to our Travel Policy for more details.
  • You're strongly encouraged to share knowledge with your coworkers, either by giving a talk or sharing a writeup.
  • Everyone makes their own travel, hotel, and conference arrangements and will get reimbursement through Abacus (so keep and submit your receipts!). Before booking, make sure you have received approval from your team lead in order to attend the conference. Per the travel policy, expenses should be submitted within 30 days!
  • You may also use the allowance to bring outside speakers to the office for Friday Talks, other seminars and workshops! Because this can benefit so many more people, we’ll value each of these dollars at triple (3x) their value. Additionally, allowances from multiple employees may be combined.

We believe in professional development for our staff and encourage you to take steps to learn new things! Conferences can be a mixed bag when it comes to learning, so this conference policy policy aims to encourage experiences that can be shared with your teammates as well as providing some guidance on the amount of time and money we expect you to spend (while still allowing people to go to a relevant conference if they want to). As with everything, if you have something specific that doesn’t fall within the bounds of this policy, we’re happy to discuss!


How to attend a conference

Once you have requested and received approval for the conference or other event from your team lead, please do the following:

  • Add the conference to our ongoing tracker here Lock if it's not already listed.

  • Add your name to the card and a note about the reason for your attendance. Glitch teammates attend events for various reasons, so this can be:
  • Personal Learning / Professional Development - things like conferences, classes for you as an individual. This is likely the default reason you would be attending a conference or class.
  • Business/Partnership - if you're attending something to represent Glitch for a business opportunity, partnership, to get users, etc. This is only for events you have specifically been asked or designated to attend on Glitch's behalf. Requires specific approval from your team lead.
  • Speaking engagement - If you have been asked to attend an event as a presenter, please let your team lead know in advance so we can decide if this should be a case to use your own professional development resources or if you will be attending in an official Glitch capacity.



Some Examples:

  • Kiwi Bird decides to go to a local, one-day conference on cloud computing in NYC that costs $149 and now has $3,351 and two (2) days left for the year that they can spend on conferences/learning.
  • Glitch Fish wants to go to PyCon in Poland and spends $1000 on the flight, $700 on the hotel and $900 on registration. Glitch Fish is gone for four (4) days and uses one day of vacation in addition to the three (3) conference days given. Because there's no other conference Glitch Fish wants to attend for the rest of the year, they decide to spend the remaining $900 on bringing Joel Spolsky to NYC to speak (the $900 counts as $2700 for this purpose).


Speaking at Conferences


We encourage people to speak at conferences! If you have questions as to what's appropriate to disclose about the company to a public audience, please discuss it with your team lead and/or Anil and Jordan.


Conference Travel Expenses

Glitch will handle all expenses for the conference that are not provided by the hosting conference, subject to the rules above and the Glitch Travel Policy.


Conference Time Off

If you're invited to speak at a conference, the day that you speak is not counted against your three (3) conference days. If the engagement requires traveling a long distance, please discuss it with management before you apply to speak to make sure this opportunity is worth the time dedicated to it.

Mentorship



Informal Mentorship

Who can help me with this thing I want to learn? Finding the right person to help you will probably depend on the technique, technology, or deliverable you've chosen to pursue. See the Mentorship board Lock for people who feel able to mentor on your target skill or technology. Add the skill or technology you're seeking to learn if you don't find a match. Or post in the #mentorship slack channel!


Formal Mentorship

We recently completed the pilot round of Mentorship at Glitch in December 2017 and learned a lot! Based on discussions across the company, we developed two primary goals for the program:

Goal 1: Fulfill Glitch’s promise to be a great place to work
Lots of us talked about employee retention - giving new people a structure to learn and build a career. We also heard about mentorship making working here feel more joyful - we like to learn and we like each other.

Goal 2: Develop staff and share knowledge
We talked about things like “bus-proofing” and preventing knowledge loss when we experience turnover - a general theme was the idea that redundancy is good in this regard. We also want to help each other become better, more productive, more effective team members.

If you'd like to know more about how the pilot program went and how we felt we met our goals, see this doc Lock.


Friday Talks

Friday Talks are times set aside on Fridays afternoons where we can learn about a variety of topics from other team members. It's an excellent opportunity to learn from other teams and colleagues!

What are the goals of Friday Talks?

  • to be a safe space for people to talk about their work and interests
  • to facilitate collaboration and learning among the team
  • to act as an outlet to share creative thoughts

What should a Friday Talk look like?

  • talks should be no more than 30 minutes total (10-15 minutes for the talk and 10-15 for questions and discussion after)
  • talks should serve Glitch in some way. We're not looking to narrow the topics to our own products or company business, but want this time to be beneficial to everyone that attends.

If you're interested in giving a talk... Add a row to the list Lock! Put your topic in the title and a brief summary in the description, then add yourself to the card. Keep in mind that some topics may require more time for discussion and for those I encourage you to plan several different Friday Talks in a series. Jess will contact you directly regarding your pitch to get everything scheduled and ready to go. Then your card will be given a due date moved to the confirmed column.

If you wanna know what's upcoming for Friday Talks so you can make time to attend...Check the Friday Talks confirmed list and pay attention to weekly #announcements, where the next talk will be posted. Discussion and other info the day of will occur in the #friday-talk slack channel.

Tuition Reimbursement


If you're interested in taking a course at an accredited university or college which will further your professional skills, get permission from your manager. Under most circumstances with prior approval, we'll reimburse you for the cost of the course, all registration fees, books, and course materials.

    You must have prior approval
    The course has to be related to your work
    For full tuition reimbursement, it must be at an accredited college or university
    You must get a B or higher