Experience highly dependent on luck and business unit - Survey Researcher RTI International Employee Review

3.0
Oct 24, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good benefits, very nice campus, easy work, good access to training, big portfolio of work, 8% 401k contribution, good PTO accrual, many good genuine co workers, high starting salary for entry level jobs, total compensation package is pretty good for NGO work

Cons

toxic work environment that encourages working during vacations, frequent reorganizations, managers are not taught how to manage people, employees are seen as lines on a timesheet and not individuals, little to no support for scientific stature that is not paid by the client, mandatory trainings during lunch that are not billable, little to no say in direction of career -- you can be put on a project for two years that does not align with your interests or goals without consulting you at all, company operates like dozens of smaller businesses -- often competing against each other for the same contracts, very difficult to move around the org, advancement is contingent on subjective factors that are unequally applied, mundane data entry or help desk roles for people with advanced degrees, bait and switch hiring tactics, extremely vertical management chain requiring several levels of approval for anything, not nearly as diverse as marketing suggest -- in ethnicity or politics -- if you have any conservative opinion on anything keep it to yourself because you will be labeled a pariah, company pretends to be a non profit research think tank when it wants, and for profit when it needs -- employees get the disadvantages of salaried work (long hours, unusual hours) and shift work (mandatory times you have to be at your desk to monitor a hotline or reset passwords ((yes if you have an advanced degree you will likely spend most of your day resetting passwords and answering a helpdesk line), if there is a slow day or week you have to sit there and charge vacation instead of overhead because you have to be available for the helpdesk, no bonuses, project directors are not willing to invest in better technologies or system to do work so employees are forced to do a lot of advanced reporting manually via dozens of excel sheets,

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5.0
Jun 8, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

RTI has a good mission

Cons

Adaptation to sudden federal funding loss.

3.0
Jun 15, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Remote work and reasonable working hours

Cons

If you're a PhD who enjoys research and hopes to use empirical research skills at a research institute, you'll likely be disappointed as I was. Projects in my business unit were largely implementation projects that required very little creativity or data analysis. I was told by my manager that empirical-research projects are harder to come by and when those opportunities do arise, everyone wants them. Even then, project directors are very unwilling (in my experience) to let you branch out to other projects. Using any overhead time to work on your own research is also discouraged, so I ended up working on manuscripts in my personal time. And there's no funding to attend conferences either. On top of all of this, constant layoffs create an aura of uncertainty and the feeling that you're lucky to even be there even when compensation for similar roles in private sector is far better.

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