Vantaggi
I have tried to be as honest and balanced as possible. - The people are great, and the founders are great. - The company is really trying hard to keep graduates engaged. - The perks are good – Thursday and Friday drinks, great central London location, snacks. - The job gives you a high level overview of all industries which is useful if you don’t know what you want to do (but when I say high level, I mean REALLY high level – in so far as a basic understanding of the value chain in the industry). - You can make the job sound very good (primary point of contact for x number of leading consultancies/hedge funds/private equity firms), and the recently updated company website can re-enforce that. - Hones communication skills as the majority of the day (if you are good at your job) is spent on the phone. - Opportunities to meet clients for lunch (analysts at these firms) to “build up relationships.” - You get very good at being productive as you are working on so many projects at once. - If you are a linguist you get to make use of these abilities on a day-to-day basis.
Svantaggi
- Lack of development of “hard skills.” Cognolink is often characterised as a consultancy, which it is not, and as such there are no opportunities to build up your “consulting toolkit” – Excel, Powerpoint etc. - Emphasis is being placed on “training” but it is job specific and superficial, not transferable. - No real career progression (From Analyst to Senior Research Associate the job is pretty much the same). - Exit opportunities are poor – leavers often start again on another grad scheme. Although this time with the caveat of being a graduate with a year’s work experience. - Whilst above I mentioned the great perks, the reality is the research team do not have much time to enjoy them as they are chained to their desks. - The majority of the work is looking experts up on LinkedIn, emailing/cold calling people, and scheduling phone calls for clients. This quickly becomes boring. - Doing well with monthly targets is luck of the draw – the projects you work on, the nature of the clients you manage, co-ordinating the diaries of the experts and your clients. - There is a lot of emphasis on metrics and stats, and many bright young grads feel stifled by the micro-management culture.