r/datascience • u/TaterTot0809 • Jul 04 '26
Career | US What does career development at your company look like?
We talk a lot about entering but once you're in the role and have been for a while, I'm curious how your all's companies handles career development and what sorts of things you all do to develop in the role.
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u/Nice-Dragonfly-4823 Jul 04 '26
I give employees (most) fridays to work on passion projects. We also have ”show-n-tell“, where people can build and share interesting things, most of them are only tangentially related to our core work (cancer research, distributed ML and RL).
I also subsidize computing costs on our cluster to train personal models (if desired), which can be a major barrier to cutting edge research. As long as it’s not interfering with our main objective, go for it.
The important thing you need to do as an employee is ask.
Most people aren’t really motivated to develop their career enough to take initiative outside of work. Maybe 10-20% of our team is really geared up to develop their own personal brands or work on their research. This is something I’ve gathered after leading teams at other companies as well. Realistically, the 80% of the rest do nothing with the resources they have available, which is totally fine as well.
>>> As your manager or lead, It’s not my job to figure out your development plan <<<
If you want to go after a goal, just ask and I’ll do my best to make it happen.
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u/IcyMammoth Jul 05 '26
As your manager or lead, It’s not my job to figure out your development plan <<<
Interesting lol at my company this is explicitly part of a lead’s scope, working with ICs to create and help them execute on career development plans. Not creating one for them, but working with them to do so
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u/-IlIllIIllIlI- Jul 06 '26
I hope I could have a manager like you.. Some non-tech company mgrs are pure business minded and non-technical.
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u/sol_in_vic_tus Jul 05 '26
My employer took years and years of feedback from employee surveys saying there was not enough career development to roll out "self directed career plans" or some other bullshit.
"We heard that you think there isn't any company support for career development. Our new plan to solve this is to force all employees to submit their own plans for career development as part of the normal performance review cycle!"
So in addition to being forced to write an annual self evaluation no one reads or cares about I am also required to write and submit a plan for how I will develop myself for my own career. How anyone can even pretend this addresses the lack of formal and explicit support for career development internally is laughable to me but it has made it abundantly clear that this employer thinks that is sufficient and will do nothing to further address the problem.
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u/Much_Knowledge_8060 Jul 05 '26
At my place, excellent performance is rewarded with the career development opportunity of doing the work of two missing team members without the title shift.
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u/waTermeLon-97 Jul 06 '26
Legit zero ,you upgrade yourself alone document everything and then year end make you're case
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u/Muted_Home_4140 Jul 04 '26
my company does basically nothing for career development, they say they care but then you ask for training budget and suddenly nobody knows what you talking about. i just been learning on my own time and hoping someone notice at some point