In general, great people, good place to start your career but not a place to grow it - Anonymous Rakuten Kobo Employee Review

Thank you for taking the time to write your detailed review. We are glad to hear that you found your colleagues great to work with and that you felt like you were working for the greater good. We also appreciate hearing that you think we handled the COVID-19 situation well. It was something we never expected to have to deal with in our lifetime and we took the time to listen to our employees and their needs during these difficult times and be as accommodating as possible. Despite the pros of working at Rakuten Kobo, you mentioned a couple of concerns, which we wish to address. We review compensation annually against benchmark market data and acknowledge the market is moving quickly so are reviewing data more frequently and are in the midst of launching our 2022 compensation cycle. Our total rewards package includes base + bonus + stock equity + matching RRSP + benefits. Regarding employee development, we offer a generous training and development budget that our employees can use. We also offer free Udemy for Business accounts, as well as several courses developed by our training and development teams at Rakuten Kobo and our parent company, Rakuten. We send out monthly reminders to employees to reach out to the training and development team for any career development opportunities they might be interested in. Even if your manager doesn’t actively engage in your development, our Employee Experience team is there to help. We have also recently hired an Early Career Program Lead to help build our R&D teams pipeline with the best available talent. We appreciate you taking the time to write your review. We take these reviews seriously and continue to develop and improve our organization based on the feedback we receive. We will continue investing in manager development programs to ensure managers understand the importance of growing their talent. In addition, we will continue to grow our mentorship programs and work with employees to pair them up with the most suitable mentors. Best of luck in your future endeavours!