Job Title: Research Associate
Location: Washington, DC
Submitted on: 04-Mar-03
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Workplace
Survey |
| Research Associate |
Culture: Business Direct. People are respectful to each other. At the
RA level most of the issues that arise are with managers workstyle.
Getting a good manager is very important to feeling like you can survive
the job. The work is individual and so you have a team but RAs almost
never collaborate on work - except during training a new employee.
Other issues are feeling like a workhorse/slave. You work long hours
and get as many projects as your managers can give you without ruining
the quality of the each deliverable. You write reports which can start
to feel like you are a human search engine/ person on a production line
in a factory. The company is very young.
RAs are fresh out of college and are in the position from 6 months to 3
years at most and managers are just out of grad school w their masters
or two years work experience or something comparable. It can be hard to
take direction from an incompetent manager since they are only a year or
two ahead of you.
Good points about the job: you learn how to find information about any
business topic - and even just general information - really well; you
work independently and therefore if you don't like your colleagues much
you don't need to interact w them much in order to get the job done;
everything is electronic in that the intranet has everything from
submitting a request to have your computer problem fixed to looking up
the photo and interests of the person you met in the hall; you learn how
to manage a project from inception to completion; you have direct
contact with fortune 500 clients to make sure you know what exactly they
are looking for in the question they pose; you learn how to write
in "CEB business language" which is just direct, to the point, hard-
hitting information (usually); if you work long hours in the office it
pays off really fast; you can work from home pretty easily and depending
on your manager they make it easy on you as long as you get your
projects done on time and you can move up pretty fast bc the co. is in
steady growth phase. Also if you have a good manager they will try to
get you the projects that interest you but only if you are lucky. Also,
anyone can get this job: as long as you have a bachelors in anything,
some case ability for answering questions during your interview only and
are professional you can get this job.
Bad points: There are ton's of RA's since that is the backbone of the
company and there is lot's of competition for the few positions to
advance; RA's produce a majority of the work that keeps the membership
growing yet they get little recognition from the co.; manager's are
young and often not very experienced in providing good leadership; you
work long hours on tons of projects and it's questionable if anyone even
reads the final project bc you hardly ever get feedback from the client
on your work; and that also means that it is essentially your manager
who you aim to keep happy not the client; when recruiting, the company
pushes the fact that it has so many young ppl and that it's a great
place to work bc you get to meet new ppl and make friends through work
but when you actually work there, you will notice that outside of your
start group, it is really difficult to get people to be friendly outside
of work.
Diversity: seems important to the company but I saw a majoriy of white
RA's with some asians and indians and one or two black people - so i
think it's partially interested in diversity. more women than men by a
lot.
Hours: 9-5 but flexible. they are understanding about personal issues
and you can even work from home every one in a while if your projects
permit; though, regardless of how much time you are in the office, you
will not work 40 hours a week any week you work there. ave - 60 hours a
week.
Dress code: casual most days. this means jeans, sweaters, open toe-ed
(sp?) shoes even. but there are dress up days when you dress business
casual - button up shirt and nice slacks for guys and something
comparable for women.
Advancement: you are either really good at what you do as an RA and get
to move up; or you work at CEB so long that you are the best by default
(this means you are an RA in your 2nd year and have established yourself
and are going to be better than the younger members on your team. at
that point if you want to advance, you pretty much can.)
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