I have no idea where to even begin...I was hired by Huntington as an Assistant Director about 3 months ago. I had originally applied for a center about ten minutes away from my home, but by the third or fourth interview (I lost count) the job was eventually moved to a place over fifty miles from my hometown. Okay, well in this economy you take what you can get. So I accept the position and begin training. First thing they attempt to do is get you to sign a "non-compete" agreement, which I had heard they try to enforce wholeheartedly...in other words you can't even tutor privately after severing ties with them or they will come after you and sue you. Then, they attempt to have you sign a "loan repayment agreement"...this is a document that states if you leave the company before six months, you owe them any money back for training that they provide...training lasts about six weeks. That is borderline illegal if not downright so. Anyway, I did not sign the documents and just hoped they did not notice, which they didn't.
Now for the travesty of the job...it is ALL marketing...and the embarrassing kind. You are required to visit 60 local businesses a month in order to try to form "partnerships" with them to drum up business. Perhaps in New York City, or another large urban area, you would have enough businesses to have that number make any kind of sense. However, in the small town that I was in, 60 businesses meant that I was already repeating customers by week four. And business owners are NOT happy about you showing up every few weeks to bother them with nonsense that does not improve THEIR business. This practice will take up approximately 70% of your time. Then, when you are in the office, you are bogged down with such amounts of mindless paperwork it will make your head spin. The job was listed as 10:30am-8:30pm, but since you are salary...they expect all work to be completed. I never once left by 9:30pm and I often came in early so as not to get yelled out by some woman on the phone from the corporate office about waiting until the morning to fill out paperwork from the last batch of students from the night before.
The worst part is, the full-time staff is mostly people who thought they would be teaching in a classroom by now. It is downright depressing, as everyone's dreams are just sort of shattered on the floor about the place. It really is not what anybody wanted to be doing and it shows. There is so much more...and here it is in bullet form:
-tutoring methods archaic (all materials dated prior to 1985, references to President Carter, President Reagan, disco music, cassette recorders, 8 track, VHS)
-no retention of part-time staff due to low pay (11/hour to tutor?), yet complete reliance on part-time staff...I had to hire 11 tutors in three months, only 3 stayed
-some days were fine and calm, but when the end of the month came and numbers were not met management would start flipping out and have you cold call former client families to try to get people in...there is nothing more uncomfortable than calling a mom or dad and trying to get them to fork over 6000 dollars by attempting to scare them that their child is in danger of falling behind...based on?
-all conferences with parents are recorded and when you allow them time to discuss privately, the recording is kept rolling so that if a family decides not to sign up, center management will listen to the private conversation to hear the reasoning and call them the next day to try to persuade them with this new found "knowledge"---apparently this is not illegal, but a deplorable tactic
I urge you, if you are considering this place for employment, to think long and hard about what you are getting into. This is not "education"...that part of the business is handled, or was handled, by some people back in the 1970s. This is a business, first and foremost. They seem to take advantage of the teaching job market the way it is to staff their centers with goodhearted and well-intentioned certified educators, then use and abuse them for not being all about the dollars. I was able to somehow, on my days off, find, interview for, and land another job that is a more 9-5. Huntington tried to say I would have to pay back all of my training money, but when I informed them that I never signed that agreement, needless to say they were livid.
