Is this course eligible for tuition reimbursement?

Carolil

I'm interested in how you all treat courses and trainings that are outside the traditional sit-in-a-classroom model. I can think of two examples; one is an online course, either as part of a degree program or not. The other is something along the lines of the Rosetta Stone model, with which I confess I am not yet entirely familiar. I gather from an employee that Rosetta Stone (for those who haven't heard of it it's a foreign language learning program) provides software, practice opportunities, and assessment tools. Does your policy allow for either of these types of programs?

Still Need Coffee

Our policy is more a professional development program and less a tuition reimbursement program. We only reimburse for items that are outside required job training, but will help the employee in their current role. For example, we reimburse for professional organization membership fees, books and classes for certification exams, webinars/seminars on job-related topics, etc.

In the examples you mentioned, we would probably reimburse for the online course if the topic were job-related. As for Rosetta Stone, the only time we would reimburse that is if (let's say) we had a salesperson who was working in a Chinese market, and he wanted to learn Chinese.

I know some companies will reimburse for all continuing education, regardless of whether it is job-related. In those cases, I'm guessing the webinar would qualify but Rosetta Stone wouldn't, as it is merely a skill and not an actual degree or continuing education item.

Hope that helps!

NaeNae55

First, do you have guidelines? Does the information learned fall into the guidelines, and do you explicity forbid online classes or language classes?

The key in most cases is not the method of learning, but rather the information learned (is it relevant) AND verification that the course was taken with positive results. That is, we would want some proof that the course was completed and that the employee passed a test or got a grade, etc, to show us they actually spent time AND effort on the class.

cnghr

Most of our employees who take classes take them online, since those are easier to fit into your day if you're working a full-time schedule. Our educational assistance policy states that the course must be related to the employee's current position or a foreseeable-future position in the organization in order to be eligible for tuition payment or reimbursement, and they must be able to prove that they passed the course at an appropriate grade level (for letter-graded courses, that would mean a C or better). So pretty much any form of learning is acceptable as long as it meets those requirements.

joannie

We handle much the same as cnghr, although we require employees to obtain approval prior to starting the course. Reimbursement would then be made upon successful (passing at C or above) completion.

cnghr

Our employees are required to obtain approval from their supervisor before signing up for a course and then I sign off on it also. Since we offer tuition advances as well as tuition reimbursement, most of our employees prefer to have us pay for the class up front, so to keep control of it we require it to go through HR.

Dutch2

We too require preapproval and the course must be work related before we will consider paying for all or a portion of the class. We do allow both in classroom and on line course work.
I do know of a few employers that will pay for course work depending on the grade the student receives. 100% pay for an A, 80% for a B, etc... They must pass the course in order for their employer to pay any of the cost.
We do not have many requests for these types of courses as we have a vendor that supplies hundreds of on-line job related (banking) courses for us and we require each employee to complete several of these each year. Some of the required courses are directly related to their jobs and others are selected to give them a broader understanding of banking.