Avantages
The benefits and starting salary ($15 an hour with no experience in a lab) are great for an entry level job. It deters people from leaving immediately. The coworkers are nice and willing to help you out if you don’t know what to do. You get 30 minutes of lunch and two 15 minute paid breaks that you can combine together to have a one hour lunch break.
Inconvénients
Very high turnover rate. There is always 1-2 new trainees that come in every week (every Wednesdays) and most laboratory assistants have only been working there for less than a year. As for work, you have to meet a certain quota per day or else you will get written up. This causes people to either make mistakes because they are trying to finish up things before the end of their shift or work overtime to avoid those mistakes. If you make one mistake, you will also get written up as well. Make another mistake and you’ll find yourself fired. This is due to the work’s high expectations and the importance of not mixing up patient information. Management is super passive aggressive. They will call out people in emails that are CC’d to every employee and supervisor that ProPath has hired. It creates hostility between departments. Furthermore, it seems that management has plenty of things to juggle. My supervisor in particular does not have time to sit down and work with our team. The culture is nice, but anyone that does not fit into the culture ends up getting fired. People are forced to fit into the culture or else they run the risk of getting fired. Although I believe that people should share the same core values, they should also be able to have different ideas instead of forcing them to have the same minds as other employees in there. There are also employee cliques as well, which is common in every place. I have found that some employees have left because they do not feel like they belong, but that is something that happens in every workplace, not just ProPath. However, it seems that a good amount of people are leaving due to that. If you are a pre-health student or thinking of going into healthcare, this job is not for you. Although this job is in a clinical laboratory setting, it is 90% unrelated to anything you will do as a healthcare worker. You will be doing grunt work such as putting patient info in a database and process specimens. Try being a laboratory assistant in a research lab, you will get more relevant experience there.