Pros
-This is, hands down, one of the best places to learn about the events industry, standard practices, and to meet industry professionals. You should take advantage of every networking opportunity (there are lots) and really get to know people from the supplier side. It is up to you what you make of it. -Opportunities to travel - I got to spend significant time in various cities around the country. -Great location and beautiful office space. -A good percentage of the employees are genuinely wonderful people. There are a lot of young, new grads so it can take a little time to get to know people.
Cons
-Toxic blame culture. Instead of analyzing issues and working to resolve, finger-pointing and undermining coworkers is common. Mistakes will be held over your head for years, and promotion is based on how much political power you have, or how much someone in a position of power "likes" you. It is a popularity contest. -They talk a lot about how they want innovation, but when employees try to make changes, it is discouraged and even punished. They want employees who will just put their head down and work, not strategic innovators who want to make change. -They pit departments against each other by creating internal "clients" and competing for budget dollars. They ask mid-level employees to negotiate client rates with internal coworkers who we then have to work with on teams, creating tension and resentment. -Lack of appropriate staffing, especially in the events department. Not only is the pay low for the level of work that we were doing, but we were all stretched thin. They would hire event professionals to do customer service work, and then wonder why people were miserable. Hire appropriately for the position and hire enough people! The amount of turnover made it hard for client consistency and probably cost more than just hiring a few more people to ease the workload. -There was a lack of technology to do our jobs. For a company that does so much project management, we didn't get a project management tool until Spring 2017...and it wasn't widely rolled out! We had to beg for it. We used MS Excel for project management until we got this tool. Such a large company should invest in proper tools to enable employees to do their work, but there was a lot of red tape. This created inefficiency and wasted time. -Service units (events, marketing, IT, sales, etc) were treated unfairly, often disparagingly, by upper management. Considering how much intense and complicated work the event managers did to create successful events, we should have been seen as thought partners and had a seat at the table, but were seen instead as low-level task-completers.
