More employers are offering debt-free education and upskilling opportunities

PepsiCo is offering its employees the exciting opportunity to do more work! Classwork, that is.

On February 22, the company announced a partnership with Guild Education to provide employees with more than 100 debt-free education and upskilling programs. Pepsi will cover the cost of tuition, books, and fees provided employees remain at the company for a year after completing the course.

Ronald Schellekens, CHRO of PepsiCo, told HR Brew that Pepsi will partner with accredited institutions, including multiple HBCUs, to offer opportunities such as high school completion courses, upskilling training, undergraduate college classes in business, and data-analytics bootcamps.

Sounds familiar…PepsiCo is hardly the first to crack open a can of upskilling.

• Companies like Walmart, Amazon, Starbucks, and even Dolly Parton’s Dollywood foot the bill for employees’ college tuition and fees as they work nine to five, then five to nine in pursuit of a paycheck and a degree.
• Gas-station chain Sheetz recently announced it would double its tuition-assistance program as part of a bid to hire 3,500 workers across six states.

1 + 1 = 3 (Morning Brew, can you pay for our math class?) When some of the biggest names in corporate America (and country music) hop on a benefits trend, we pay attention. In the case of education benefits, they may pay dividends.

According to a June 2021 Gallup poll commissioned by Amazon, companies offering upskilling could have a competitive advantage when it comes to recruiting. Forty-eight percent of Americans said they would switch to a job that offered upskilling, and 65% of workers “believe employer-provided upskilling is very important when evaluating a potential new job.”

Evolve. The half-life of a skill is estimated to be approximately five years. When discussing educating and training workers, Schellekens said, “The world is evolving very quickly, jobs are evolving very quickly. Many of the jobs in the future are not invented yet. So we need to anticipate that and make sure that people are as versatile as possible. The more they have a knowledge base, and the more they keep on developing themselves, the more we can anticipate these new roles.”

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