 Vanguard Group, The Interview Surveys
Vanguard Group, The Workplace Surveys
Vanguard Group, The Salary Surveys
Vanguard Group, The Business Outlook Surveys
Job Title: Financial Counselor
Location: Malvern, PA
Submitted on: 07-May-03
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| Financial Counselor |
The Malvern (Valley Forge) offices of the company are still professional
dress. The IT division is a little looser. The company has a very
frugal culture, tends to develope systems "in-house" versus off the
shelf because "we are vanguard and nobody knows how we run our ship."
This tends to produce technology that is often too late and too little.
Nothing original gets done. We are very proud of how little we spend to
run the operation. The Admiral Share class was in reality a revenue
give-back that has basically hamstrung the company from investing in
itself recently. The pay sucks. If you come from the outside (like I
did) you have to get everything you want upfront (sign-on bonus, base,
etc.) because you won't get it once you are in the door. Previous work
experience means nothing once you are in. The IT division loves getting
the talent from the likes of Lockheed Martin, GE, Unisys, Conrail and
every other large companies IT divisions that have shrunk in the easter
PA area over the past 5 years. Once inside it doesn't matter because
you will be outnumbered. Forget about raises. The company had a four
scale rating system (prior to last year) where 1% of the company gets
an "Exceeds" rating, 60% get "Achieves" close to 30% got "Needs..." and
the rest basically don't make it till review time. Anyhow they
revampted the reviews so that 1% of the 1% get "consitency exceeds, 5-10
percent get "exceeds" 80% get "achieves" and the bottom get "needs
improvement." With the "redeployments" going on this past year
(consitently denied in the press, and vanguard never lays off), getting
a needs improve rating means you need to look elsewhere. Oh, in case
you were wondering I received an "exceeds" rating this past year. That
equated to a 2% raise. Sure glad I busted my hump to by doing more and
better than the rest so that my raise could be double 60% of my
coworkers who got a 1% raise. To put this in perspective, inflation was
2.2% this past year. Vanguard likes to use the phrase total
compensation, which includes partnership which is to count towards your
comp but shouldn't be included for its not guaranteed. Anyhow the
company line is that it aligns shareholder interests with the crews. In
reality it is an involuntary deferred comp that you get after the fact
and is capped. Everybody knows it's capped, until it got out in the
press that Brennan and other officers partnership payouts are not
capped. No wonder Brennan wants to get to 100 per share by 2005. It's
not really the motivation you would think since the majority of the crew
is capped and all of the crew will be by then. So if you don't mind
being underpaid for the next few years.....
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