Vanguard reviews

There are only three reasons to work at any company. The pay, the work or the people. Vanguard does not offer any real way of increasing your salary measurably from your initial pay. Managers are supposed to set expectations that you will not make a lot of money. Vanguard does not give a cost of living increase and the average increase in pay rarely beats inflation. Vanguard does offer a profit sharing program that rewards employees roughly based on market performance. The only way to make a decent living at Vanguard is to become a "salaried" or "exempt" employee. At which point you will also be eligible for bonuses. However getting into an exempt position may take many years as you are expected to pay your dues to get there because in most cases your measured performance has zero bearing on actual promotion opportunities. The work is not rewarding and it does not allow you to build up your skills to apply them towards any upword or outwards movement. Jobs are divided such that you lack the skills that your counterparts at other companies possess. At Vanguard there are three people to do the job of one at another institution. This makes you less desirable and competitive when looking for outside opportunities. Vanguard also does not give you any opportunities to show leadership and as a result if you are not recruited in as management material it is almost impossible to get there. The people in general are institutionalized. Through years of corporate propaganda many are afraid of the outside world. They believe that working at any other company is suicide since they could be laid off. This also leads to a lot of backstabbing since opportunities for growth are very limited and since performance is difficult to track the only viable way of comparing yourself favorably is to backstab your coworkers. All of this though is a direct result of incompetent management. Managers are afraid to make the tough decisions and therefore the company has stagnated. Most managers have very little understanding of the work that their employees do and as a result can not make effective decisions for the best interest of their teams. They spend most of their time in meetings or on projects that will never actually make it to the floor.

Management is typically terrible, they are outsourcing many of their services, and they do not really care about their employees. Salaries are not competitive, massive disconnect between management and people who actually take calls/process requests. Many times I was told to only focus on high value client accounts and put lower dollar accounts on the back burner.