The reasons why I left were a lack of career progression and meaningful personal development. My main responsibilities involved answering emails, preparing outreach campaigns, hosting video calls, and managing Special Issues. The only personal growth that would align with these workflows was simply getting more efficient at doing them. You are encouraged for personal development but any newly learned skills are incompatible with stagnant workflows and legacy software used to this day. With such an environment, you are left feeling that you are learning things for the sake of learning or developing skills for when you quit. By the end, it felt like I was working in a glorified call centre and I ran out of patience to wait until this changed. It did not help that there were no changes to my salary for over two years.
In addition, the redundancies and reorganizations (yes, multiple) of the company in 2024 introduced a clear change in work culture. The goal of "making science open' was replaced with the battle to keep the graphs going up with little consideration for scientists or employees. There is no clear vision for the company in the long or short term. This lack of vision also affects relationships with scientists, as even on my last day, I could not tell them why they should work with Frontiers and I struggle to say why you should too.
