One of the very awesome perks we have at Stylight is to be allocated a personal development budget – which for engineers goes up to 2500 euros.
This budget can be spent on conferences, training, workshops, online course, and pretty much anything that contribute to a career development.
A lot of engineers just spend their personal development budget on conferences – like one of our Lead Developer, Charles Lirsac who went to the GitHub conference in San Francisco last year.
Some of us are opting for online classes like Stefan Tippelts, one of our Business Analysts, who got a full class on Data Sciences and Big Data Analytics from Harvard which he completed with the obtention of a certificate.
I personally opted for a mix of conferences and online courses. This year here is how I spent my budget:
Conferences:
- Tech Open Air conference in Berlin – highly recommended for the interesting network, the large range of topics addressed, and the very good vibe of the conference – I even took a blockchain workshop on a boat, given by the amazing Dimitri De Jonghe from BigChainDB – who happened to be also one of the speakers at the DAHO.AM conference that I curate each year.
- Code.Talks conference in Hamburg where I also gave a talk about “Build Your Tech Network!“
Online Classes:
As an organizer of hackathons (internally and externally), I wanted to ramp up my skills in design thinking and creative leadership, so what a better resource then IDEO U, the online school from the renowned design company IDEO, whose co-founder and former CEO, David Kelley, adapted the Design Thinking process to business.
With my budget, I was able to get the following online courses, which I’m very much looking forward to tackling in a few weeks:
I’ll report on these classes in a few week!
Personal and career development are very important topics as to advance in your current position, and also be competitive in the job market you need to constantly ramp up your skills, and for that, I’m grateful that an organization like Stylight provide the necessary resources to invent and reinvent yourself.
Thinking about joining us? Look at our job board to see if something might fit your search for a new challenge.
