Consultant- Consulting by Degrees: Avoid this program if you are looking for career progress, learning, interesting work - Recensione dipendente - Consultant- Consulting By Degrees presso IBM

2,0
29 ago 2014
Consiglia
Gradimento del CEO
Pronostico commerciale

Vantaggi

Big, well-known company that looks impressive on a resume Salary- the pay is decent (not great) and a signing bonus is bigger than other companies' bonuses Easy to leave- it's a well known company, so a lot of my peers had no trouble finding new jobs when they wanted to leave and most of us were approached by a few recruiters based on the company name alone

Svantaggi

Work- The work given to CbD consultants is often boring, administrative office work. For example, a project used eight CbDers to update whiteboards and type PDFs to word documents and other similar tasks. The work was uninteresting and required almost no brainpower. I felt like I learned very little. Career growth/learning opportunities- The program boasts about lots of learning opportunities, but these amount to videos about how to dress and act in the workplace, not actual learning. New hires get a "buddy" as a mentor. The buddy is just another CbDer who is required to send several form emails and chats per year. The mentoring is not with a person you will meet or interact with regularly. Ability to try new things: For growing your career by moving projects, good luck. Projects often are contracts based on number of people, so they don't care who you are or what you do at your desk as long as you clock in and out so the client pays for you. Projects will not let you leave to move to new projects, no matter what the CbD program advertises. If you are thinking you can innovate and work on strategy projects, think again. That's a joke. Management- In CbD, your manager manages a hundred other people in the same program. You will talk to her twice a year and be evaluated by her (everyone pretty much gets the same rating no matter how good or bad your performance is). Managers are supposed to be allies who help advance your career. They mainly seemed to care about numbers- how many people do I have, how many are on projects (any projects, does not matter what they do on those projects) CbD advertises like it's a strategy or at least management consulting job. It's not. It's basic technology implementation. You will spend a lot of time bored doing nothing but working long hours bc you need to clock in and out.

Esplora altre recensioni su IBM

5,0
29 mar 2026
Consiglia
Gradimento del CEO
Pronostico commerciale

Vantaggi

Good work life balance across projects

Svantaggi

Need to keep looking for projects actively

4,0
26 ago 2014
Consiglia
Gradimento del CEO
Pronostico commerciale

Vantaggi

Disclaimer: A lot of what I'm writing below of course depends on the work area and management chain. But I found this to be fairly pervasive policies in IBM in my 9+ years with the company. 1. IBM's policies and management are very flexible when it comes to working remotely or accommodating various life situations (sick days, doctor visits, etc.). Management is encouraged to measure an employee by their work and impact, and not by hours spent at their office. 2. Great colleagues! Though unfortunately, many have been leaving due to the instability of IBM's HW development business. 3. At least in my area, there's a high level of flexibility on which projects should I undertake based on my and my management assessment of business impact.

Svantaggi

1. Unfortunately, IBM still uses the "normal distribution" rating system, where at the end of the year each employee is ranked as a top contributor (5%), above average contributor (15%), average contributor (~75%), and bottom contributor (5%). This curve is difficult to apply in the R&D world, where you may have many members of the team working long and hard hours, and end up being "average contributors" at the end of the year, because there just isn't room for all to be top contributors. 2. The above may not be so disturbing, if only IBM didn't practically cancelled all raises, performance bonuses and incentive for the non top-performers. I've had a consistent "above average" rating in the last 4-5 years, and my raise and performance bonus were ridiculous mere 1.5-2% of my salary. Were I rated "average contributor" I would have gotten NOTHING. So you can imagine that people can go year after year without any raise to their salary. From talking to manager friend, this is IBM's way to eliminate the non-top-performers without having to fire them, as part of its direction of reducing US manpower. 3. Hiring freeze in many areas - again, as part of IBM's attempt to reduce its workforce across North America and Europe we see many jobs move to the India and Far East markets. This is of course upsetting to see local teams shrink and disappear, especially when many great local IBM colleagues and experts begin to drop out. From my experience thus far working with India SW teams - they are still very far away from the standards I would have expected from US and Europe based teams. 4. Poor top down communication about company's and divisions' future. Employees learn from rumors and news websites what's about to come...

636
avatar
Risposta di IBM
10y
Thanks for sharing your experience, and we're glad that you've had a positive experience working with talented colleagues and taking advantage of IBM's programs. IBM is in the midst of a major transformation, --our Systems business is going through its own changes to strengthen competitiveness. Change is never easy. As part of our transformation, we just launched a whole new approach for how we are coaching employees, delivering feedback and managing reviews. No distribution guidelines or what some think of as 'stacked rankings." What's particularly great is that this was co-designed with our employee base from all over the world... to the tune of hundreds of thousands of page views, comments, on-line debates and discussions. IBMers even named the new system Checkpoint, to reflect the regular feedback rituals we're adopting. Managers are more empowered with the new methodology to help them acknowledge the great work of their teams and help their employees develop professionally. These steps and more are showing up in our employee surveys as well. So IBMers are feeling the change. We are confident these changes will help us in continuing to attract and retain great talent.
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