Holiday Gifts

A few recommendations and reminders cause tis the season!

Hi everyone!

I have a few recommendations and reminders to share with you all today since it's the end of year and holiday season.

Education Reimbursement

This is an under-used, lesser-known perk in most tech companies from my experience!

Many tech companies have a fair amount of budget for employees to develop themselves. It can be a set amount you can claim through your regular expensing or it can be budget available specifically for learning & development that you claim through a specific process.

I'm here to remind you to ASK your manager and/or peers and/or benefits team if something like this is available to you. If yes, I'm also here to remind you to USE it! I have a few suggestions and links in this post for what you could spend this budget on.

Team Holiday Gifts

This is also the time I see many leaders sending out team holiday gifts. Personally, while I have enjoyed the chocolates, teas and sweets when I received them, the most memorable gifts were learning gifts! Books, subscriptions and courses. They really made me feel like my leader cared about my development.

Most of my recommendations below are also good as team holiday gifts of you are looking to send something special to your team.

Recommendations

I have purposely kept this list short to focus on quality over quantity. All of these I’ve personally spent time and/or money on and truly enjoyed them. I hope you will find them useful too!

Books

5 books from other industries with lessons for Tech

A book to have energizing and productive meetings or summits

A book about effectively using data

Courses

Berkeley Exec Ed Programs - I recommend the Negotiation & Influence program as well as the Women’s Executive Leadership program here! They can also work with your organization/company to create custom programs.

Advent of Code - This one is free! A fun team-building activity for engineering teams to solve coding puzzles together while learning something new.

Subscriptions

Level Up by Ethan Evans

Scarlet Ink by Dave Anderson

High Growth Engineer by Jordan Cutler

A shameless plug

If you've liked ChaiTime, I'd love to be on your education reimbursement or holiday gifting list! I intend to write more paid subscriber series and grow the ChaiTime library of resources for paid subscribers in the next year.

My paid subscription is still at a discount through end of year! You can also purchase group subscriptions from the link below.