Empowering our ZEOs with Career Cash

by Zuora intern Cameron Steppe, Employee Communications

At Zuora, our employees are empowered to be the CEO (i.e. a ZEO) of their Zuora experience. Which means providing the resources, tools, learning and development to grow professionally. One of those resources is a benefit we call, “Career Cash.” 

With their manager’s support, ZEOs around the globe are reimbursed up to $1,000 (or regional equivalent) each fiscal year for career development. ZEOs have used their Career Cash in a variety of ways from conferences to courses to software training. It’s a pretty awesome benefit if you ask around…which we did! 

Conferences

Istvan, Robert, and their team at the Percona Live conference.

Istvan Podor, a Principal Mysql Engineer in our San Mateo office used his Career Cash to attend the Percona Live conference, an open source database conference in Austin, Texas. In fact, Istvan’s manager, Robert Barabas, supported the whole team’s use of Career Cash to attend the conference. According to Istvan, “in open source communities such as the data storage world we are a part of, meeting in person is really important. It’s a great chance to recruit, make friends and learn new things.” Through Career Cash, Istvan was able to learn about “how the industry is shifting in terms of licensing, cloud usage, who the new competitors are and what new solutions we should be chasing.” Robert also said that the conference “allowed [him] to learn about technologies that we don’t currently employ at Zuora and to look at the features of newer versions of technologies we do use.” 

Photo of the Great Place to Work for All Summit, taken by Kelli Ryan 

Kelli Ryan, Employee Communications Manager based in San Francisco spoke about her experience attending a conference through Career Cash.

“Through the Career Cash program, I was able to attend the Great Place to Work for All Summit in February. At this three-day conference, I was able to network with colleagues and discuss the challenges of building an inclusive workplace. Plus, this conference allowed me the opportunity to hear from subject matter experts on how to tackle these tough issues. After countless sessions and some truly remarkable speakers, I took these findings back to Zuora more empowered and inspired than ever!”

Courses 

Steve Yeager, an Account Manager in our San Francisco office used his Career Cash to take three Harvard Business School classes and one performance mindset course. Steve learned about “building a performance mindset and strong habit building, negotiation, corporate finance, and disruptive innovation theory.” Steve, a major proponent of Career Cash (and Zuora), reflected:

“I gained real world skills that help me in my everyday job, from building teams to managing customer relationships to building new best practices and structures to support our new phase of growth as a company. It’s a major commitment from the company to invest in its employees with very few strings attached, and shows trust in ZEOs to build and progress their careers with the company’s support.”

Software Training

As an instructional designer, Zainab Hafiz from our San Francisco office wanted to keep her Adobe skills sharp. Through Career Cash, she was able to purchase the Adobe suite that enabled her to work on her Adobe skills. Zainab also used Career Cash to take the course: “Designing a Business” which helped her work on some of her professional goals taking them from an idea to a potential reality. Zainab “always wanted to take courses through IDEO before and Career Cash made it a reality rather than a someday.” 

Another ZEO, Jerome Rigor on our Sales Development aka “ZBR” team in San Francisco used Career Cash to take classes in SQL, data visualization in Tableau, and financial modeling in Excel. Jerome appreciates that Career Cash “provides [him] with more skills to consider new positions in the future.”

Personal Development

Arun Srivastava, a Senior Manager of Global Services RevPro in our Chennai office, has guided his employees to use Career Cash “based on their current and future requirements at work that will help in their professional growth.” Many of his employees have requested Toastmasters Club, a course that helps improve public speaking and communication skills. Arun has seen an increase in “ confidence” by his employees. He believes Career Cash is “a very good benefit for ZEO’s enhancing their professional growth. ZEO’s can fulfill their desire to learn.” 

Career Cash is just one of Zuora’s growing catalogue of ZEO-development resources in which we give our employees the freedom to further their careers. 

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