My experience has been great, unfortunately the cons outweigh the pros.
Pros
Good atmosphere, strong leadership, strong foundation, great office experience to grow a career (potentially elsewhere) I understand that Mr. Blackman wants all of his employees to have free healthcare and with the high turnover rate it's nearly impossible to do.(I was going to put that into cons, however I understand where IST is coming from) Work-life balance is not bad. Everything is in black and white. You're expected to be at your work site at X time and you get to leave at Y time and get paid for it. Not too hard of a concept I saw some negative reviews about this but that is just life, and I have seen IST work diligently on this issue but due to some client demands this isn't available. If you embrace the suck long enough there are good opportunities for progression, I have talked to people who have overcame the hurdles. I haven't experienced a lot of clients but the couple that I have interacted with and sites I worked at are very positive and great people to work with, and interact with. IST is also very charitable, and raised a lot of awareness to certain things in particular Cystic Fibrosis which I have nothing but the utmost respect for their efforts. Their software for the most part is really great, you can track a lot of items with it as well as communicate with end users with just about everything you do for them. -Other notes from other people who wrote inaccurate examples about IST -Someone implied that IST is racist. IST is one of the best equal opportunity employers I have seen I have seen numerous ethnicities among the various levels of IST. I came to realize that the person who was complaining doesn't type well or spell well, Which isn't a good look for a company that is supposed to have 0 errors with grammar and spelling since we are in the copy industry. -Another person complained about their client being nuts. Could be a multitude of reasons this is. My assumption is you're not meeting the clients demands. If it wasn't for the Client that pays IST my guess is that you might not have a job. "Don't bite the hand that feeds you"
Cons
I'm not even sure where to start for cons. It's not necessarily IST's fault it's the aggression of the business they are in with all of the competition. They tend to undercut bids against rivals and unfortunately the workers on the front lines that provide the real customer experience for the clients have to pay for it financially since most of the contract money goes towards HR, IT, operations, and all of the other overhead costs. Not only is the pay low for some of the work you do depending on your area. The paid time off is atrocious I don't by any means expect to have a lot of time off but you accrue 8.68 hours per month and that includes sick time, vacation time, personal time, holidays etc. You are forced to take PTO for your clients holidays (unless there is another site open on that holiday you can potentially work there but it's not a guarantee). So if your client has 10 holidays and you can only accrue approx 14-15 days per year your actual vacation time is 4-5 days per year. My biggest pet peeve is that a service specialist in Manhattan NY is only paid $10 an hour and you need to wear a tie with presentable dress clothes which costs decent money unless you want to look like a slob. The pay doesn't add up to what your required to wear let alone do. The cost of living in Manhattan is insane you can't take a taxi for more than 5 minutes without it costing you $15 dollars, if you have to go over a bridge to get to work forget about it. Currently the George Washington Bridge is $13 about to go up, the Brooklyn Bridge is $16 to cross, the Tappanzee which is a little ways from the city is $15. McDonald's employees in NYC make almost ten dollars an hour with very low expectations (there are reports its minimum wage but I know someone who had no experience making $9.50 not in a supervisor role. Meanwhile IST has low wages with high expectations. IST is also in the software business and most of them are good people and they have good software . But don't try to critique their software they get very offended and treat you differently afterwards. I recently completed their site manager course which consisted of ten essays based off of videos you watch and it's not an outrageous thing to ask, but you don't get compensated for doing it on your own time because I don't believe in doing work for IST during the clients billable hours. For my efforts I received this plaque that I thought a 9 year old put together for completion. I expected better than that saying how their specialty is in that area. The punches were all over the place to hold the certificate down, the plaque was cheaply made and came from china. It was just a mess. I'm still trying to figure out how corporate can have high expectations of you and send you that junk. I also caught someone committing fraud with their employee motivator "Blackman Bucks Auction" who in my opinion stole over $2000 over the course of two auctions. Never got a thank you from corporate or good catch. There's another auction this weekend and he would probably would have stolen another $1000. Luckily they have their best Operations Manager in my area who is never on the reports, never misses approving employee payroll hours like some of their other operations managers who seem to not have to take accountability for their continued negligence on being on these reports that get dished out on a daily basis and its the same names over and over again.
