The answer is good. It could emphasise this point more: "[...] see about getting a salary bump or promotion in your current company.".

Good balanced answer. One thing I would add: engage in FORMAL career planning. Write a career plan with quantitative metrics and actionable items and start tracking progress.

@Oddthinking - it's difficult to imagine a clearer sentence. "just invested a small fortune" is totally incorrect. No-one can conceivably describe a few hundred dollars as a "small fortune". That part of your answer is absolutely, definitely incorrect and indeed deceptive. I would suggest, use the edit button and put in a dollar amount, instead of a staggeringly incorrect description such as "a small fortune".

And further: "recommend waiting it out at least another year" You are recommending a junior programmer to wait a YEAR ? I don't even know how to address that. For US sports fans, it would be like recommending a gridiron running back to "wait 3 or 4 years" and see what happens. It is mindbogglingly bad advice, dispensed willy-nilly with no thought to the market, the profession in question, or the future effect on the OP.

@Fattie: "small fortune" is a common idiom. It doesn't have to mean millions. The answerer can't put a dollar figure because the OP doesn't mention it, but your assumption of "a few hundred dollars" seems awfully stingy. My first full-time employer spent tens of thousands of (2020) dollars on my training in the first few months. (My contract required reimbursement if I left early.)

There is nothing in the question asked that would indicate the company spent anything close to a small fortune. Indeed the op stated it was a negligible amount to them. Companies throw around money all the time, it's not necessary a huge investment. This answer makes a lot of assumptions that are not in evidence

The fact that there's no repayment clause is also strong evidence that this was not a unusually large amount of money or a major investment.

$5,000 can reasonably be called a small fortune despite your protestations, especially in comparison to the OPs starting salary. You don't get to say it is flatly wrong. Asking me or the answerer to edit a number that we don't know is not reasonable. Dismissing the figure without evidence is not reasonable.

@Oddthinking "$5,000 can reasonably be called a small fortune despite your protestations" No, it can't. $5,000 could barely be called 'a small fortune' for an unfunded startup with 1 employee. Nothing in OP indicates that the company in question is so tiny that a $5,000 expense on human capital would be anywhere in the neighborhood of 'small fortune'.

So to summarise: The OP says they invested tremendously. The answerer summarises that with a common idiom that vaguely means "a lot"/"a surprising lot". The answerer is attacked for being "factually" wrong about a subjective idiom, by commenters assuming the amount was about the price of a one-day course, and comparing it to the total outgoings of the company rather than the more reasonable comparison to loaded costs of this employee. I stand by my objection: the use of the idiom in this answer is fine, and saying a subjective idiom is factually wrong is just silly.

@Old_Lamplighter - As pointed out by other comments, I think your answer assumes the training was more expensive than it truly was. I've added some details into the question showing exactly how expensive the training was.

It's also worth mentioning that I did get promoted within the last year, also. A second promotion is certainly not on the horizon for at least another 2 years.

Your company just invested a small fortune on you. They should have taken into account the risk of quitting (and bind OP to them by a clause in their contract). Beside that I fully agree with you (+1)

@Oddthinking So, to summarise: The amount expended by the company in the amended OP is by no stretch of the imagination a 'small fortune', an exaggeration which forms the basis for the warrant presented for the claim in this answer. Making this answer more or less wrong at its foundation.

On top of which - "They see something in you that said "let us spend money that we don't need to spend on making this person more valuable"" is simply wrong. No 'well established company' which has $4k to spend on a single employee's training is doing so one iota because they altruistically want to improve the life of that employee. They want to 'make this person more valuable' to them. It's a cost benefit analysis that leaves the employee's desires entirely out of the calculation. For the employee to then take the company's "feelings" into account is a mistake of the highest order.

@AlexM: Once again, "small fortune" is a broad term. It is not a term that is precisely defined by a third-party standard. It is not a term that is precisely described in a dictionary. More importantly, you and the other commenters are not authorities that get to decide what it means. When you insist that the answer is wrong, because it doesn't meet your arbitrary standards for an broad idiom, it is just bluster.

@AlexM it's wrong to say that an employer "leaves the employee's desires entirely out of the calculation". If an employee wants some training that is of little or no benefit to the employer, but the training costs less than finding and training a replacement for the employee, a smart employer will provide the employee with the training. It's certainly not altruistic, but employers do plenty to improve the lives of their employees (starting with paying them), and for employees that want it, training is a relatively tax efficient way to do that.

If any of you were so stuck on the idiom "small fortune", you should have suggested an edit, rather than ignoring the whole of the answer, and bickering in the comments. Better yet, you could have posted an answer of your own. This isn't reddit folks.

@James_pic yes, but the employee's desires are only a part of the calculation insofar as such desires generate the risk/cost of the employee leaving the company (and subsequent hiring/training of a new employee), not because the company actually cares about the employee's personal growth beyond their functional value to the company. So sure, you're technically correct, but it's only as part of a cost benefit analysis that gives zero 💩 about the employee's actual feelings.

Where did this ridiculous notion come from that a "small fortune" means a specific dollar amount? It doesn't. It never has. It's simply an idiom which means a price which is surprisingly or unexpectedly high compared to expectation. It can be $10, or $10,000. Anyone claiming otherwise is wrong.