Control Risks reviews about "people"

Limited advancement possibilities ok salary

Pay very low compared to average in the field. No room for improvement or steady pay increases or promotions. Extremely high turnover of bright people as they do not care about them.

The Management's inability to allocate proper funding to IT for asset purchase and hiring

Lack of career development for younger professionals

IT is often not given enough importance. If you're a consultant or editor it's probably better

Working in threat intelligence there feels like you're back at secondary school. Firstly, all of your work gets marked out of 10 in an opaque contradictory process. Second, the "management" choose a select few to join their clique and put on the non-transparent path to promotion. The management have no experience in managing people and are out of their depth. They are haemorrhaging employees - 11 have left in the last year in a team of about 26. The "Researcher" position is constantly advertised on LinkedIn as they are desperate to backfill for the people they've lost. Sometimes they held sessions to chat about how things were going and areas for improvement. You quickly realised that anyone who provided constructive feedback would be punished with bad scores or mean comments being made about them amongst management. I still cannot believe some of the comments I heard from them about junior colleagues. The only way to survive is to keep your head down, stay "in" with the cliquey management and definitely don't be honest if anyone asks you for feedback on how you find the process. Aside from the toxic environment, the work is interesting for the first few months and most of the people are great. After a while, you hit a ceiling for the OSINT/ intelligence skills you can gain and then the only direction is to take on more responsibility in admin, recruitment or training new starters. The work is dogged in technicalities with every meeting introducing new guidance that will be scrapped the next week. Also, the salary is not enough to survive comfortably in London - salt in the wound when the management bragged about how much money threat intel brings into the firm.

- No investment in employee's professional development. For the Business Intelligence practice, research and writing are pretty much the only hard skills you have as a researcher. They might argue OSINT skills, but it's largely basic surface web research and is not transferrable to actual OSINT roles. - Fixation on billable man-hours, narrowly defined as any work tagged to a project. 1) The high KPI on this makes it virtually impossible for a junior employee to spend time on personal development, though there's not much resource on that, either. 2) There are non-billable hours that are still essential to winning billable projects, such as proposal writing and scoping; however, it is perplexing that the management has decided that these are not part of productive hours. As a result, sloppy proposals, underestimation of project price and tight timeline are common, and the directors would leave it to the project team to deliver anyway. - Stagnant if not declining industry, with declining pool of clients and project value. As such, the most common way companies gain advantage is to undercut price or promise faster turnover. There's a limit to how fast the project team could realistically complete a project without either sacrificing quality or work overtime every single time. Any feedback on this has fallen on deaf ears. - Fixation on revenue means little to no effort on employee welfare to retain them. Systemic issue such as described above is the source of dissatisfaction, brain drain and poor morale, and this couldn't be offset by random wellness sessions instigated by HR. - No transparency from leadership, even on the most basic things like tracking our own monthly KPIs. Salary discussion is actively discouraged. No, it is a good practice to minimise information asymmetry and ensure fair pay and to prohibit that just worsens your reputation. - Compensate your employees accordingly. So many are offered bottom of the pay range despite their track record showing otherwise. Company is only willing to bump up compensation when they're threatening to leave. This shows you have the budget all along, but aren't willing to reward them if they had stayed. Why is that? Also, bonus is really low. - No clear career progression, which has been largely based on tenure. I'm beating the dead horse here, but I still think it's necessary to say that having mostly Caucasian leadership regardless of the office location (even Asia) despite having locals as the majority of mid- to junior-level employees indicates a lack of willingness to localise the practice at the very least. As I have said, there are so many highly, and even over-, qualified people at the lower levels.