Pros
The salary and compensation is great and good exposure to the oil and gas industry.
Cons
It is not a bad company at all, the compensation and benefits are great; but the corporate culture and the nature of the job will not appeal to or suit everyone. The corporate culture can be best described as a party atmosphere akin to a college frat house. There are happy hours all the time which you are expected to attend after long hours at the office [8 to 6pm on the record, 7am to 7pm off the record] and drinking in the office after 4pm on Fridays. Socialization outside the office is a must although it is not presented as such. Fashion is essential. Evaluations and advancement opportunities are based in significant part on popularity. I would not recommend this company to anyone that is not Caucasian. You are expected to come in early, work late and respond to a few or more customers on weekend. You will probably end up working from 7am to 7pm most days if you are lucky, you will have to skip a lot of lunches and you have to work a few hours every weekend and one half day on a weekend once a month to quarterly. There are lots of extra project that can take up countless hours of extra work a week outside the office hours discussed above. And all of these above and beyond efforts are not appreciated or compensated. The bonuses are based largely on your ability to generate sales rather than other tasks. The training period is over 3 months with in class instructions, demos etc and weekly test which you have to put in several sometimes dozens of hours outside work to ensure you do well on. The job itself can best describe as part customer service, sales and telemarketing that have little complexity once you are knowledgeable about the system. You train a few new customers every day which consists of repeating the same information over and over from a script about how to navigate through their website.Your rankings in terms of the number of customer request you handle or initiate is vital, but it is easy to stay on top of these charts. The most important thing is how many customers you are able to invoice when they have campaigns for various companies. These campaigns are essentially telemarketing and getting the contractor to agree to be invoiced at that time which is pretty easy if you are willing to be deceptive and unethical. It is common practice to tell them you are just sending them a quote rather than a bill etc and such efforts result in higher sales numbers which is highly rewarded. It doesn't require any degree and you will certainly not utilize your experience from the MA program. The main thing is this entry level position pays well with 45,000 base salary and up to 15,000 annual bonus and incentives (bonuses are much higher in the second half of the year and negligible in the first half). It is best if you know it is a good match for you and you are able to move out of this position quickly. After 6 months only a few associates out of our group of 50 hires received promotions and many more had quit. people quit frequently generally and some have been fired suddenly with no explanation. Even when you are promoted those positions require a lot of travel almost half of your time so the next level may not be ideal for everyone either. It may be a strategic short term opportunity as well. Once the supervisors decide they don't like you for whatever reason, they can be pretty harsh and make life very difficult. But there are quarterly rotation of supervisors so you will survive and hopefully the next one will treat you better. Also, the customers can be very difficult with just cause once you get to know how complex and intricate the system and the requirements are. Imagine if it takes them over 3 months to train their associates and they only allot 30 minutes to train the contractors most of whom are minimally computer literate. The website is counter intuitive. It shifts the responsibility of health and safety regulations from the large firms to small companies that might be a one man operation and ISN that is supposed to be the middle man has a complex system with little assistance that all adds up to overburdening the average small contractor. You will probably find yourself sympathizing with the frustrations of the contractors a lot of whom choose to end the relationship with the hiring firm requiring it to escape ISN or outsource the handling of ISN to other companies. It wasn't a good fit for me but maybe a great fit for someone else. Some fit in much better socially so are able to endure much longer than I did. If you have other offers that offer more challenging opportunities then you have to seriously weigh those options. If this is your only offer it may be a practical short term career move. On the plus side dallas is a wonderful place to be and with more fortune 500 companies in Texas than any other start you should find somewhere else to transition to easily.