Formerly a great place to work - Implementation Manager Pearson Employee Review

Cons are: management is extremely autocratic AND the cast of characters changes every year or two, so you can be given information such as "It's fine with us if you work from Location X," but after you've changed your life to allow that to happen, a new regime can come along that completely changes its mind about that. Suddenly, you need to change your life again. In addition, few projects ever get completed because the constant reorganization accompanies constant changes in direction and goals. The few consistent trends of the last years have been to own and promote as much testing (assessment) as possible, to the point where this company even owns the GED! News reports on Pearson are embarrassing to read, and there is the appearance of malfeasance. The ordinary people who work there are good people, people of integrity, and reading about some of these edgy operations is embarrassing to us. The company's philosophy in terms of its product has become highly focused on vertical integration, and developing a market where they have investment in the schools, texts and tests. On a worker level, it is also becoming increasingly difficult to succeed as an older female, so age and gender issues - at the very least - affect your potential outcome. Raises are practically non-existent, and advancement opportunities are few and far between. If you are a female with technical skills, you can expect to use your skills as a project manager. This is partly because of a default preference to make women project managers instead of doers, but it is also because the entire company simply does less and outsources more. There used to be a yearly volunteer day, which has been eliminated, and with that has gone any sense of the company having an investment in the community. The hierarchy has become more rigid, so workers have less and less control over their own daily lives. If you keep up with these things, you might have seen the studies that say high stress is associated not with management, as previously assumed, but with a lack of control over one's job. Pearson, where we were told a couple of times a year that our jobs were not secure no matter how well we performed, has become a cluster of terrified, stressed employees. People are mostly doing at least a job and a half, if not two jobs or more, because of the failure of management to fill vacated positions. The stress of having all that extra work, combined with the stress of individuals being afraid to object lest they lose their jobs, has made the place more like a gulag than like the friendly, inspiring, exciting place of employment that hired me 15 years ago.