How to expense engineering manager training.
Most companies will cover this through their learning and development budget. What stops it is almost never the money. It is that the request arrives without anything the person approving it can forward, and management training is the easiest line to defer when nobody has explained what happens if you do not do it.
This page is what to send and what to say. There is a one-pager at the bottom written for the person who has to approve it rather than for you.
Does it qualify as professional development?
Yes, on the two tests most L&D policies actually apply. It is structured training with defined content rather than a conference ticket or a subscription to read things, and it is directly relevant to the job you are being paid to do. It is delivered online and designed to fit around a full-time role, so there is no time away from work and no travel cost, which is usually the expensive part of sending somebody on a course.
Finance normally wants two things. An invoice or receipt suitable for expense and reimbursement, which is provided, and a predictable cost, which at $599 it is. It is a single one-off payment, not a subscription, so it lands as one line on a training budget rather than a recurring one somebody has to keep re-approving, and there is nothing to cancel later. $599 is a limited time price and will rise, so it is worth getting the approval moving rather than sitting on it. Whatever the price is on the day you buy is the price you pay, and it does not change afterwards.
What to actually say
The mistake is arguing that you want to get better at management. That is true and it is not an argument, because it puts the benefit with you rather than with the team. The version that gets approved names the cost the business is already carrying.
Getting the people side of management wrong is expensive, and almost none of that cost ever appears as a line item. The mistakes are quiet ones. A difficult conversation delayed until it becomes a resignation. A strong engineer whose 1-1s stopped being useful, who starts looking elsewhere. A manager who keeps doing the technical work themselves and becomes the bottleneck for the whole team.
Any one of those costs the business significantly more than this does, once. Replacing a single mid-level engineer typically runs to several months of their salary once you count recruitment, notice, ramp-up and lost delivery. A performance issue left to run for two quarters costs more again. The business is carrying that risk already. This is the small, predictable cost of reducing it.
This costs less than a week of a single engineer's salary, once. Replacing that engineer when they leave costs months of it.
It is also low-risk to approve, and it is worth saying so explicitly, because the person signing it off is the one carrying the risk of it being a waste. There is a free first week before anyone pays anything, and a full refund for seven days from the day they do, which is a fortnight in total before the money is committed. And if they finish the whole program and still do not feel able to handle these situations more confidently, they get a further 1-1 mentoring session at no extra cost.
What they are approving
It is a structured 90-day program rather than a library of videos, so the work is sequenced against what a new manager actually hits in their first three months. It is bought once and kept for good, including anything added to it later, so it does not go stale six weeks after it is approved.
The 90-day program
- Nine modules and 48 self-paced video lessons, mapped to the twelve weeks of the program so each one lands in the week it is needed.
- A worksheet and template bundle: the listening tour, one-to-one agendas, delegation handovers, difficult conversation prep and stakeholder updates, filled in about their real team rather than a case study.
- Three AI management simulations for rehearsing the conversations that matter. They practise holding a line with their own manager, giving feedback to a defensive senior engineer, and confronting someone who has quietly stopped trying, then get a written debrief on how they handled it.
Guided, not just watched
- Two 1-1 mentorship sessions with an expert mentor, booked when they reach them rather than on a fixed date.
- A capstone: a written 90-day plan for their actual team, read and marked by our experts and returned with notes. A document they can put in front of you.
- A certificate once the work is done and the capstone delivered.
- The EM Scorecard in week one and again in week twelve, so the change is a number rather than a feeling.
Kept for good
- Seven expert interviews with senior engineering leaders from companies including Google, Meta, Salesforce, Pendo, n8n, Cognite and Medely.
- A growing Q&A library of real questions from working managers, answered on video.
- A private community of engineering managers working through the same problems, with direct access to Ryan.
- Everything added to the program later, at no extra cost. There is no renewal and nothing to cancel.
It is run by Ryan Murphy, who has nearly twenty years in software engineering and built and led engineering teams at Yelp. He is a six-time top-rated instructor at Dometrain, served two years on the LeadDev programme committee, speaks at LeadDev and CTO Craft, and writes to an audience of over 80,000 engineers and engineering leaders each week.
The numbers
$599 is the current limited time price rather than a permanent one. If approval is going to take a few weeks, check the price on the day rather than quoting this page. An invoice or receipt suitable for expense and reimbursement is provided for finance. For questions on billing, invoicing or enrolling several managers at once, email ryan@emaccelerator.com. If you are looking to train a whole team rather than yourself, on-site workshops are usually the better route.
Send them the one-pager.
Written for the person approving it rather than for you. What it is, the business case, what is included, and the cost. Ask and we will send it over, then forward it with a line saying you would like to expense it and let the document make the argument.
Ask for the one pager →