We all remember our first professional job out of college. Likely we shared a mixture of excitement and nerves – eager to make a good impression and to not do anything stupid.  Assuredly, these were the same things going through a young developer’s mind with the Reddit handle cscareerthrowaway567  – that was until the young programmer accidentally deleted his company’s entire production database and that nervous excitement turned into panic and terror. You can read the details of his error on Reddit, here.  In a nutshell, the young developer had to create his own test database, but in the onboarding materials, the login credentials to the…

There are many traditional ways that companies measure performance and they’re most often tied to the bottom line or some other financial or output indicator. While these measurements are, of course, important, a more difficult to measure, but oft overlooked component of performance is employee satisfaction and engagement. It’s not a coincidence that some of the top performing companies in the world often show up on “best places to work” lists. Employee engagement is actually a more comprehensive way of describing what is most important for companies to measure, in that, beyond general satisfaction, it indicates a commitment to the company and to co-workers, plus an enhanced sense of well-being. Often employee engagement is said to include…

As more and more companies are recognizing the benefits of investing in ongoing professional development, there has been a surge in the creation of corporate universities (or academies as they’re more commonly known in Europe and Asia). While the definition of what makes for a corporate university can be a bit fuzzy, the Boston Consulting Group found that the number of these universities doubled from 1000 to 2000 between 1997 and 2007, and then doubled again between 2007 and 2011 to 4000. What that means in terms of spending on corporate training is profound, with a 2012 estimate of around $400 billion for…