Vantaggi
Base salary is on-par with other SaaS start-ups
Svantaggi
Toxic culture- This company was still making employees travel for "optional" work retreats throughout most of 2021, except for one major issue: it wasn't truly optional. Not attending in-person meetings and off-site gatherings are detrimental to your career at Degreed. Management believes these meetings assess who is serious about the company and who is not. The sad truth is after these meetings, people contracted Covid-19 and thus they finally stopped in Q4 of 2021. The fact that this company was so brazen as to continue in-person meetings during a pandemic with multiple variants says a lot about how much they care about employees. No long-term or short-term strategy for future- Over the last 15 months, many top executives who had been with Degreed for years have left this company. That tells you a lot about what these "insiders" thought about the future of the company. Degreed is overpriced, adds little value other than aggregation of learning content (anyone can do that) and the company has missed its window in the marketplace to really make an impact. Larger competitors like Workday and Microsoft can come in and squash Degreed like a bug and they have in the past year. Degreed is a long way from success and the ride is VERY rocky. I don't believe they can pivot and sadly, I think they have exhausted their ability to make the company a success. It will be downhill from here. Lack of true learning experts across the business units- It is pretty shocking that the company that attempts to help others learn does not have true learning experts within the company itself. Degreed, as of Q4 2021, has exactly zero PhD's or practicing learning experts employed. Most of the people running the company don't have any background in research or true expertise on how to help people learn. There are a lot of unqualified, non-experts people at Degreed pretending to be experts which gains you very little credibility with buyers and executives. Extremely high turnover among salespeople and "leadership"- On paper, yes, you can make a good amount of money if you sell the SaaS product that Degreed offers. In reality, more than 50% of the sales team will miss quota each quarter and subsequently each year. There are multiple reasons for this, A) it's a very long sales cycle, 12-30 months B) the product is overpriced compared to the market and compared to the fact that an HRIS company like Workday can provide Workday Learn for free c) Leadership has no idea how to position, market and sell this product. What this means is that every salesperson is on their own, just hoping that someone will avoid asking the right questions during discovery. A lot of the sales leaders at the company were just selling the product themselves last year or the year before -- many of them couldn't get promoted at LinkedIn or were fired from other SaaS companies and they ended up at Degreed. Sales leaders are completely unequipped to be in their positions and don't have the skills to do their job effectively. CEO is out of touch with reality- We all know that SaaS start-ups and emerging SaaS companies need a great CEO to act as a north star for the company. The current CEO has no idea what he is doing. He is so out of touch with reality that on company-wide Town Halls and monthly team calls he starts out by talking about the "logging equipment" he had to "truck-in" to clear his oversized property in California of trees. I'm not sure if he thinks he can impress his employees, is trying to "humble-brag" or thinks it is acceptable to talk openly about a multi-million dollar property that he lives on while the rest of his employees work 50-60 hours a week to make him rich. It adds no value to the team calls-- and I share this story because I think it sheds light on what type of person he is and his mindset. Out of touch, completely. He also set forth the culture of meeting in person and off site gatherings during a pandemic. Not a very bright person. Lastly, DO NOT fall for the benefits package. The unlimited PTO only means that they are hoping you take very little PTO and if you do you will be considered someone who is not serious about success. I have witnessed this play out, first hand.