Getting an Education at Google

Google offers more than just a job to it's employees, it offers an education as well.  This WSJ piece documents how Google's program works and what they try to get from it.

• Last year, Google offered more classes to more employees than it ever has before, with about a third of its 33,100-strong global workforce going through the in-house program. It cut classes that didn't work and retooled others. "What's important is that it aligns with our overall business strategy," says Karen May, Google's vice president of leadership and talent, who has led the revamping of GoogleEDU.
• Getting these programs to work, though, is tricky. Management experts say it is all well and good to send employees to classes, but to get the lessons to stick, employees need to apply them to their daily work lives. Employees often take a class and "say, 'Gee, this is great,' and go back to their jobs and do the same old thing," says Professor David Bradford, director of the executive program in leadership at Stanford University.
• Google thinks it has found a way to make its learning stick. It has become more exacting about when it offers classes and to whom. It uses employee reviews of managers—similar to the instructor reviews that college students fill out at the end of a semester—to suggest courses to managers. Ever data-obsessed, Google uses statistics gathered from current and former employees to recommend certain courses to managers at different points in their career, say after a move to a new city or joining a new team.
• Google has also begun offering specific classes based on an employee's work area (engineering versus sales) and career stage (junior developer versus senior manager). "The more targeted it is, the better, because it is specific and actionable," says John Baldoni, president of Baldoni Consulting LLC, a leadership coaching-and-development firm based in Ann Arbor, Mich. "The downside of leadership development is that it is too often amorphous and doesn't speak to people in the language that they need at a specific time."
• "More individualized, customized recommendations are part of how, as we grow, we're trying to individualize and personalize the learning experience here," Ms. May says.
• Even before the formation of GoogleEDU in 2010, Google would assign promising young product managers career and management coaches who would teach them how to negotiate better salaries, improve their presentation skills, or talk through the reasons why someone should or shouldn't leave to found a start-up, remembers one former employee who left the company in 2007. He says that such programs "engendered a lot of loyalty" among employees.