Many employers help foot the bill for their workers to attend college, partially offsetting the cost of tuition for employees who want to pursue their degrees.
The rapid pace at which job requirements are evolving, though, is enough to make any student’s eyes glaze over (Bueller? Bueller?). Skills gaps are widening as colleges and universities struggle to keep their courses of study relevant amid rapid advancements in technologies like AI.
To better respond to evolving workforce needs, the internet company Spectrum recently started offering online courses through Guild, a workforce education platform. While Spectrum still offers a traditional tuition reimbursement benefit, employees can now pursue degree and certificate programs online, without taking on additional debt.
Meeting employees where they are. Spectrum’s legacy tuition benefit, which subsidizes $10,000 worth of tuition at the college or university of an employee’s choice, is generally suited to the needs of a “white-collar workforce,” EVP and CHRO Paul Marchand told HR Brew. Taking on debt to pay for courses prior to reimbursement, as well as physically attending classes, might not be a great fit for an employee with caregiving responsibilities and financial constraints, he noted.
Given that about 80% of Spectrum’s 95,000-person workforce are in sales or delivery positions, many of which are paid hourly, Marchand and his team determined the traditional tuition reimbursement model wasn’t sufficient.
“We heard from our employees in round tables about the cost of education. And for some of those employees, they actually had a lot of debt, because they started to take classes at colleges, either undergrad or associate programs, and they stopped because they couldn’t keep up with payments,” he said.
As a result, his team came up with a solution to offer employees access to coursework through Guild at no cost. While this represents a more significant investment for Spectrum, Marchand said he made the business case to executive leaders by focusing on its potential to boost retention and employee engagement.
How the benefit works. Since August 2023, Spectrum employees have been able to pursue online and degree certificate programs from 30 universities and learning providers partnering with Guild. Marchand said his team worked with Guild to ensure the programs offered match Spectrum’s business needs, with a particular focus on “technology-based programming” in areas like “software development, programming languages, cybersecurity, AI, [and] infrastructure.” By offering this type of coursework, Spectrum is “building internal pipelines for the tech talent we’ll need” as the company expands and evolves.
Turnover is a real challenge for Spectrum, which has a high concentration of call center workers, Marchand said. In some cases, the company is competing for talent in markets with other call centers, against rivals like Verizon and AT&T. The hope was that offering an education benefit through Guild could help Spectrum “create a more sticky relationship with our employees.”
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The program outcomes thus far look promising. The majority of employees that have taken advantage of the benefit (68%) are in frontline, customer-facing roles, and participants have been promoted at a 24% higher rate than non-participants, according to Spectrum. Retention is also 10% higher among those enrolled in the program than those who have not enrolled. Employee participation with the Guild benefit is 8.5 times higher than for the tuition reimbursement benefit.
Marchand acknowledged that not every Spectrum employee will end up progressing into a new role thanks to this benefit, and may well leave for a different job. But if a worker leaves with skills that help them earn higher wages, or boost outcomes for another firm, “I think we sleep better at night as a company,” he said.
Turning away from tuition. Nearly half of employers offered some form of tuition reimbursement as of 2022, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. Such benefits typically cover just a fraction of the total cost of a four-year degree at a public US university, though, which comes with a yearly price tag of at least $15,700 on average (for students living off-campus with family).
Guild is “seeing more and more employers who had traditional tuition reimbursement” move to the type of model adopted by Spectrum, said Bijal Shah, Guild’s CEO. PepsiCo and Walmart are among the companies that offer “debt-free” education and upskilling programs through Guild, HR Brew reported in 2022.
In an economic environment where HR leaders are trying to optimize their spend, these types of offerings give employers more visibility into the types of programs workers are enrolling in, allowing them to better monitor where their money goes.
Employers also see this benefit “as a way to drive the priorities of their business,” Shah said. By integrating Guild’s education offerings with workforce planning tools or workforce management systems, HR can connect employees that have acquired certain skills with the right roles.
These efforts may be particularly pertinent for employers seeking to prepare their workforce to respond to new demands of the digital age. The goal, Shah said, is for employers to “make sure that the programs people are enrolling in are actually going to fuel the future of work that you require and need.”
Correction 04/17/2025: This story has been updated to accurately reflect the companies working with Guild