Terrible for professional growth and expertise development
Pros
- Your peers are close in age and are friendly, it's possible to make some friends from those that you start with.
Cons
- Compensation is below average (10-15% minimum), raises are inconsistent and not based on an individual's annual performance or previous experience level. - Work-life balance is non-existent and managers will sneakily use methods to get you to work overtime and during weekends. This happened on multiple occasions, with the most common tactic being at the end of the day on Fridays to ask me to have something ready for review on Monday morning. - RRSP matching is only eligible after 1 year, which is significantly different from other employers. - Paid time-off (PTO) number that is touted as a large benefit actually includes sick days and the forced holiday shutdown. Which means that even with the '20 days' cited in the contract, your actual is about 15 days and this 15 day pool is pulled from for sick days. Even during the pandemic, the company simply did not care to adjust this policy nor did they grant employees any additional days if they caught covid. Anecdotally, when I had covid and returned after a difficult 2 week recovery, the first thing that my manager told me was that I 'needed to put my time off into the system'. - No training or learning is provided to new employees aside from short learning sessions in the first week. This means you are woefully unprepared for the tasks you will have to perform. In addition, managers provide no support for project work and do not put an effort into your professional development. - Promotions are usually automatic (e.g. after 1 year, go from associate to consultant) and there is no change in responsibilities and virtually no change in pay. This leaves the promotion feeling hollow, and is simply a way to bill clients at a higher rate. - Progression at this company is doomed, as upper management positions are based on nepotism and definitely not on qualifications. This becomes abundantly clear when working with some of these individuals (AVPs, VPs, etc.) as their shortcomings as capable leaders and professionals are blatant. - The processes, tasks, and projects that you are put on will not prepare you for a career outside in industry. The reality is that the engagement managers do a poor job of managing client expectations and as a result the team will often have to do pointless menial tasks. These tasks benefit nobody, will cause you to work relentlessly throughout a week, will not teach any skills for future jobs, and not be serviceable on a resume. If your plan is to learn some skills that could be leveraged into a 'tech job', go elsewhere as none of the skills to help you do so will be learned from the projects or managers that you will encounter here to the depth that would be expected at other companies. - Engagement leads and your managers will actively blame you if something goes wrong. This is while not providing any support or resources to try and help you to succeed. - Managers do not go through any formal manager training. When transitioning from an individual contributor position into a manager position, the industry standard is to provide training to the manager so that they can develop their people management skills. Konrad group does not provide this to their newly promoted managers, nor does it retroactively mandate managers to go through this training. As a result, newly promoted managers are woefully unprepared to deal with the stresses of their work and their direct reports. This leads to managers who are unsupportive, uncaring, micro-managing, and back-stabbing to their direct reports.