Not a career, know what you're getting yourself into, take this job as a last resort
Pros
You'll work with great people you want to work hard for and who will share your frustrations with you. The checks clear. 401k and stock bonuses are decent. The Denver campus is great. Good cheap food options. Can be hard to get to in the snow however.
Cons
I cant emphasize enough that this is not a trading or broker job. It is basically a nursing job at this point. Schwab has scared away all of its real trading activity through a botched merger and refusal to fix the numerous issues on the site. Your job on a daily basis is mostly to hold hands with people who are some combination of helpless, lazy, entitled, incompetent, and/or incapacitated. Many are also mean. It is a miserable job that will break you and make you hate people. There are some nice clients you will help that occasionally feels good, but a majority of the work is soul-crushing. So many people you talk to arent suitable for trading but your're still supposed to take their money. You're rarely taking thlrade calls at this point anyway. The routing is a mess and you are expected to do the other department's jobs. Sometimes you'll try to transfer to the right desk and they'll refuse to take the call. There are regularly issues with the system and sometimes you will spend your whole day as a punching bag for clients. Schwab will rarely fix anything because trading doesn't make money anymore. Your job will be to clean up Schwab's mess and get nothing back for it. When they horribly botched a merger recently, they would give you gifts like stress balls and forks (seriously) for the trouble. Schwab recently installed metrics on the phone services that make your career prospects infuriating and close to a waste of time. Your career lives and dies by surveys. Schwab knows the surveys are often irrational (angry and/or elderly clients) but they dont care as its an easy way to not pay people and the people who came up with the system won't admit it's a mistake because they attached their name to it. Apparently, it's now gotten even worse as my friends still there tell me they installed some system that controls your bathroom breaks and they feel like they're in kindergarten again. The red tape at the company is completely debilitating and nothing gets done because of it. It became a running joke that if something was announced to be fixed or released on a certain date, add six months. A few weeks before I left, Schwab had mass layoffs because they bought a company with money they didnt have; this after having executive photo op meetings at all the offices where they would shove you into conference rooms so execs could read you a prepared script about how well Schwab was positioned for the future. That was kind of the last straw for me. It was insulting. They've done it before in the past only they have some event or celebration [they did this for the abomination of a merger with optionsXpress] and the phones are so backed up with pissed off clients mad about the exact thing they're celebrating that they tell the phone desks that they can't go. Nobody outside of Schwab (probably even in Schwab) will take you seriously. They know what the job is. I had 2 recruiters roll their eyes at me when i tried to play this off as a trading job. I was extremely lucky and had to exhaust all my resources to get out when i did. Take this job as a last resort. If you do, spend at most 2 years getting every license up to 66 then either move to sales/adviser/marketing/product side or just bounce.
