Ask HN: Tours of Duty

2 points

10 years ago

Reid Hoffman described the new Employer-Employee relationship as a “tour of duty”, or a personalized retention plan designed to give employees a concrete job objective aligned to his or her career goals. Sometimes these tours can be made for individuals on a case by case basis, other times a company has a formal program lasting for a pre-determined amount of time. These programs are often rotational to give the employee a holistic sense of how the organization functions.

The first structured example that comes to mind is Google’s Associate Product Manager program, which is designed for recent college grads and lets them work on a couple different teams, sometimes at different branches, over a 1-2 years.

What companies have established tours of duties for early, mid-level, and senior roles?

I’m aware that any employer can define a tour for employees, but I’m specifically looking for structured programs. I'd imagine these would only be at a late stage startup, government, or big company.

Would like to get a general list here, so open to non-engineering roles as well.

About Tours of Duty [0] https://hbr.org/2013/06/tours-of-duty-the-new-employer-employee-compact