Pros
-- The pay was decent -- Most of the tutors were nice. Most were doing it to supplement their day job or school, so they all had a generally relaxed and friendly attitude. -- Often we would get catered lunches when we were required to attend a training.
Cons
-- The company encourages/overlooks illegal and unethical practices (forging parent signatures on client contracts and credit card receipts, altering employees' time on the clock, misrepresenting student test scores to parents) as long as the center is hitting its revenue goals. -- Management is abusive. There is a lot of blame shifting, gaslighting, and misplaced anger by Center Directors, District Managers, etc onto Program Leads and even tutors in some cases. The company is very fickle and will note hesitate to fire center leadership if a parent takes an issue too far up the ladder, if the center isn't hitting its revenue goals, if people are going into overtime, etc. This leads to Center Directors especially getting incredibly uptight and commonly doing all the illegal/unethical things mentioned in this and the previous entry. HR is aware of this and does nothing. -- Center Directors are hired/promoted to their position based entirely on sales. The company portrays them as educational experts who develop a detailed plan for student instruction, but that usually only actually consists of enrolling students for as many hours as they can get parents to agree to. It is rare to see any Center Director with actual experience in education. They are salespeople and nothing more. -- Little actual training is provided for Program Leads. There are a couple short videos to watch your first day, but that's it. No review of company policies, guidelines, or standard operating procedures. You just sort of have to learn as you go by trial and error, which again tends to lead to anger and verbal abuse by management. -- Incredibly disorganized environment. There is no centralized way to keep track of schedules, which leads to frequent mistakes: students coming in for instruction who aren't on the schedule, students who are on the schedule who shouldn't be, etc. Additionally, there are hundreds of old books and binders accumulated all over centers because they have no system for storing materials that are no longer needed. -- Each Program Lead is required to make at least two to three dozen sales calls per day. This is usually from a list of old leads whom the center has been calling for months, if not years. -- It is really clear that the company cares only about sales and revenue, as their curricula are given very little real thought or refinement. There are tons of mistakes in the curricula and company-created practice tests because they were rushed out with little to no editing. -- The Friday-into-Saturday work schedule is very difficult to manage. Many centers are open until 9pm Fridays only to reopen at 9am the next morning. FT employees, then, would often be there until 9:30 closing up on Friday and arrive at 8:30 to set up on Saturday. This is not the end of the world exactly, but it made working Saturdays (already not an ideal situation) completely exhausting.
