Columbia Sportswear reviews

Wages are way below competitors. Company is hard to negotiate with when offered a job. Unless you are a Senior Manager or a sly brown-noser, you will have zero career pathing. Forget training to keep up with the workload. You may work alongside great people, but everyone is working 50-60 hours to get projects completed. Most departments are very siloed and territorial. Execs and Upper Mgmt like to give speeches but don't walk the talk and would rather throw you under the bus than take accountability for their lack of leadership and planning. Change is good but don't change at the 11th hour: waste money then complain that we need to cut the budget for overspending. Those leaders don't take accountability. The worst experience was when my manager told me to stop volunteering (about 30 min twice a month over lunch) in one of the employee diversity projects. Offended, I told an HR person and they did nothing.

There is a serious lack of training: The "orientation" consists of watching four training videos: 1) about health and safety (which relates more for food service). 2) Columbia Sportswear commercials from the past. 3) about basic customer service. And 4) FISH, about having fun at work (the least boring video). New hires are thrown onto the selling floor with no real knowledge of the product. They are given booklets and worksheets to study about the product technology but do not say what is the best gear for different activities. Because of this lack of training, employees became lost, lazy, or unmotivated to work. The stores are never properly stocked. Never enough product that customers want and full of product that no one bought. Also, the stock room was full of additional product that customers are not buying.