Avantages
1. Competitive Salary For recent graduates, there is a competitive base salary when considered in the context of a startup. 2. Friendly team members As the company hires pretty much only recent graduates, during my time there were several employees of a similar age who are both intelligent and extremely pleasant to work with (although many have subsequently left).
Inconvénients
1. Lack of career progression For an educational company, there was a surprising lack of interest in up-skilling current staff. There are also very limited/no opportunities to use one's own initiative due to micro-management from senior leadership. I didn't feel like I was trusted with the ownership of even simple tasks. One of the potential attractions of joining this company is to expect to receive a title promotion to "Manager" after 6 months. However, this is largely a nominal shift as your tasks remain broadly the same and you do not necessarily manage other people. 2. Long hours There was an expectation to work outside of your contractual working hours and it was heavily frowned upon to leave on time. There was also an expectation to respond to messages late into the evening or on weekends. Breaks were not normally scheduled when running in-person events which could be 8-hour shifts. Overall, I was given the impression that my personal time was not respected whilst employed at this company. 3. Poor feedback loops I didn't receive consistent or valuable feedback on my work and there were not key metrics to measure performance. It felt that the number of hours that you were willing to stay in the office was valued more than providing a consistently high output of work which was demotivating. 4. Lack of Transparency The CEO does not cultivate a comfortable environment where constructive criticism is welcome. Instead, those that offer opposing points of view were usually ostracised. I also found it difficult to deal with the lack of communication between the senior management and the rest of the employees. Key decisions in the business often were not divulged until the very last moment. Given the small size of the team, it was difficult to work in rigid hierarchal structures. 5. Culture of anxiety I struggled with quite severe anxiety for the first time due to the manner in which I was spoken to by certain members of the leadership team. There was a general climate of fear amongst employees and since the company almost exclusively hired graduates, it often felt that their inexperience in the workplace was manipulated. This issue was exacerbated because there was no HR to deal with employee concerns effectively. Overall, the toxic work culture made my time here an extremely difficult environment to work in and I would urge recent graduates to consider what type of work environment best aligns with their cultural values when weighing up their options.