Pros
Fidelity does a lot of solid training, considerably more than a lot of competitors in the field. Benefits are very good. Pay is a little less at Fidelity but when you consider benefits in the compensation package it is competitive. Workplace environment is reasonably professional and not stuffy. For the most part front-line managers are willing to work with associates to find a favorable resolution to personal issues. Managers don't throw you under the bus to customers just to make the customer feel better about a problem. There are some great employees and managers who care about the customer and care about the employees.
Cons
Middle and upper management appears to have no idea where they are trying to steer the company, so the company swings from taking an idea to the extreme to a complete 180. Today they may be focusing on customer satisfaction and personalizing the interaction and in a few months decide to strip down customer interactions to scripted nonsense. There are very few outlets for good ideas to arrive at implementation. Although there are feedback channels that may from time to time result in small changes, the bigger process issues or customer/client issues are completely controlled from the top by people who don't understand (and at times take pride in not knowing) what they manage so they don't know how to recognize or fix problems. So something may be a problem for years before somebody decides to do something about it, and even then the "solution" may aggravate the problem. Fidelity is very political. Fidelity is obsessed today with it's brand image to the public, but one thing that is always constant at Fidelity is the constant obsession about your "brand". Gossip is taken as gospel and can ruin your brand in a second. What people have to say about you will override your performance in virtually all cases. Many managers would rather sink one of their employee's opportunity for advancement to be able to keep that person's performance in their numbers. A lot of backstabbing and stealing credit occurs. There's not a lot of advancement opportunity. When the economy was great in 2007 it wasn't that hard. If you were great in your job, you could move on to a slightly better position, and when you did well there, you could move to another slightly improved position, until you were where you wanted to be. Once the economy crashed in 2008 that all stopped. I get it. That happened everywhere. However, it also stopped all discussions of professional development and no effort was made to give opportunities to develop skills for the current role or another. As a result, future promotion will be very difficult because internal candidates won't be as competitive against external candidates. Recruiting/HR and their processes are absurd. It can take months after applying for a position before you get an interview. You can apply for a role, not hear anything for several months, and then get an email that you have an interview the next day. So you end up with no opportunity to prepare and made no efforts to prepare because you never heard anything back. Feedback from interviews rarely exists or is very generic. Hiring managers are lazy and don't follow through. For every great manager there are ten clueless unhelpful managers. It's obvious that middle and upper management have no idea how to manage their people because there's very little accountability or responsibility on the part of front-line managers. Directors believe yelling at people is the only way to manage, so they will yell at their managers when the numbers are bad, and that's pretty much the extent of direction or vision executed at the management level. I have heard several managers complain that they don't feel it's right that their performance is judged based on the performance of the people they manage. Well, that's what managers are there to do. If they aren't managing towards success, then they aren't doing a great job. I understand there are low performers, etc. but when I see managers playing ping pong for hours in the break room, there's not a lot of accountability in the system. There's a lot of infighting between different business units. Everybody points fingers but nobody takes ownership over problems and fixes them. Customers and employees get stuck in the middle with no way to get out. Fidelity no longer places a premium on its talent. Since 2008 the company has eliminated whole business groups with no effort to keep around people with tenure with tremendous transferrable skills. It does very little to help grow talent or keep it from leaving. Where a few years ago employees were loyal to the company and that loyalty was returned, the company has completely eliminated that loyalty. As a result, the company keeps losing great talent and keeps hiring new people who underperform and embarass those of us who strive to be great at our jobs. While all of the above things are common among businesses and I have, as most people, experienced similar trends at other jobs, what I will point out is that these problems were not institutionalized in a company that performs with mediocrity and accepts laziness in its overall perforamce. Fidelity is a top competitior in its markets and a lot of its strength historically came from the loyalty to and from its employees. Fidelity has worked very hard to treat its employees with indifference and management -- from the very top -- has set the company afloat with no real vision or guidance other than keep trying to make things that don't work struggle to work.