Engineering Education Budget

We appreciate engineers who have a natural curiosity to them that drives their knowledge hunger. But we also believe that the company should support those efforts and help their engineers get all knowledge needed to deliver the best possible results.

How we solved this at Infobip is that there is a dedicated education budget on Engineering level which can be used for acquiring special skills that support a certain business need. The budget is used in agreement with your Line Manager.

A few things to keep in mind when thinking about requesting the budget:

• It should be used for expanding knowledge in relevant fields or closing the knowledge or skill gap within the team;

• Sharing is caring! Newly-acquired skills and knowledge should be shared with the rest of the community

Rapid Software Testing Explored is a great four-day online course led by James Bach, who is one of the leaders in the software testing community. My colleague Vladislav and I decided to use our education budget for this course. RSTE turned out to be a mind-changing course, where we learned new powerful ways to think, to apply heuristic models and to test responsibly and systematically. After the course I’ve started to actively use SFDIPOT model when working on my testing strategies, and I find it beneficial.

Lidia Barkanova, Quality Control Analyst (St. Petersburg, Russia)

I used our education budget to get a yearly subscription to Harvard Business Review. HBR is an excellent source for management and leadership topics. I really like that they are often using researches and various data so it is not just someone's opinion. As an engineering manager, I gained a lot of interesting insights, especially about hybrid work in the last few months.

Matija Basic, Engineering Manager (Zagreb, Croatia)

My team and I visited Frontend conf in Moscow, which is an excellent source for frontend development topics. The purpose of this conference is to sort out professional issues and problems, broaden horizons and talk about development. The speakers were really interesting with experience that is very valuable for us, especially in user experience, performance and testing areas. As frontend developers, we were really excited to visit this event to learn more about the ways to create new solutions and to keep existing ones at the cutting edge of technology.

Natalya Belyaeva, Software Engineer (St. Petersburg, Russia)

I used edu budget to participate in Saint Team Lead Conference 2021. The conference have proven itself to be a great source of presentations, workshops for team leads and managers, and also a great opportunity to talk with experienced people from different IT companies. There were several takeaways for me as an EM from the latest conference. One was a story of a company that decided to pursue no-team-lead self-organizing teams’ structure and it was a good opportunity to compare it with ourselves. Another one - which I gained mostly through the workshops - are good practices regarding the retrospectives on the team level and above.

Stanislav Slavin, Senior Engineering Manager (St. Petersburg, Russia)