Open questions, please share about relevant companies / working cultures:
which company cultures would encourage candidates to also invest in MSc / PhDs while working at their companies?
which companies encourage employees in continuous learning (e.g. a PM interested in refining research skills; a data-science background interested in expanding skills in applied fields, as climate / earth science / economics ) ?
which companies sponsoring (or partially sponsoring) MSc / PhD ?
In France companies are financially incentivized to hire PhD students through mainly tax deductions. There is a framework aroud this called Cifre. This is allowing small and medium companies to jave access to PhD students and give more opportunities to students to optaim funding. Matthias S. can maybe discuss about his experience. I haven't seen a similar model here in the US
Luigi A., the CIFRE system PhD system provide fundings (I guess from the gouvernment) for a company to create a research project in partnership with a University. It has multiple advantages on both sides. Other than reducing the financil risk for the company, the University also access real data to work with for instance. For your second point I think that there is a system in which every employees is accumalting days he can later reclame to get "days off" for a training in any domain.