2y
Thank you for the feedback. To respond to a few points:
1) With regard to turnover, we've actually never had an engineer quit, and only let go of one because of performance and interpersonal issues. Presumably this person.
2) The comments on career growth are surprising. We have many employees who have moved from entry-level roles to other, more advanced roles within the org in just a few years. Within engineering, we've had multiple team members move from Engineer 1 to 2 within the past year alone. In addition, as a rapidly growing company, many junior engineers are able to work on projects from start to finish with complete ownership of the results, rather than as a cog in a machine of a larger organization. This allows great opportunity to work on products that they might otherwise only have a small part in at other organizations, and is great for career growth. We also encourage travel to our factory locations overseas to directly oversee alpha/beta samples and making fast tweaks to perfect their work.
For education, there is a budget for each department specifically assigned for education. We've had a number of engineers recently take a six sigma certification series.
3) The lack of career growth opportunities is contradicted in their own statement: "The majority of the leadership have not held management positions before, and have been grandfathered in..." So, that shows that we have indeed promoted from within, and in fact have a strong preference to do so. There is no "grandfathered in" either. Employees in a leadership position have been promoted to that role. We have plenty of people in the organization who have been with us for many years who are not in leadership roles, so reaching that position is not a given.
In full transparency, when we hire from within, this does lead to involuntary turnover if and when those employees are not able to grow with the organization. This is a normal occurrence in any rapidly growing company. But if you're the type that wants the opportunity, would you rather try and fail, or never have the opportunity to try? We always look for giving people the option to try, and hopefully providing them the tools to succeed.