A good foot in the door, but expect to stub your toe
Pros
A great opportunity to enter an otherwise quite opaque IT industry. FDM holds corporate relations with some extremely prestigious clients across multiple industries. The training and the 2 year trainee program that FDM offers will set you up with the experience needed to forge a good career in the IT industry. The trainers and staff at the Leeds academy are very friendly and knowledgeable, and help to inspire confidence in all of it's trainees.
Cons
My experience is that as a whole, the way FDM treats it's employees is cold and clinical. Make no mistake - to FDM you are a resource more than you are an employee. As a trainee (under 2 years experience) at FDM, you must be geo-flexible, meaning that FDM may send you anywhere in the country. In my experience, FDM do not take into account the preferences of it's employees when deciding this. Speaking from personal experience, it is possible for an employee to lose thousands of pounds in relocation costs when changing placements, as the notice periods given are often laughably short, leading to overlapping housing contracts and such like. FDM do provide some assistance towards this, but in the short term consultants can unexpectedly find themselves very short on money. The holiday allowance provided is the absolute bare minimum required by law - FDM employees are only entitled to 20 days of bookable holiday plus bank holidays, which they are not paid their full working day rate for. Sick pay is not provided for your first 6 months with FDM, and even as an employee with nearly 2 years of experience I am only entitled to 4 days per year without incurring a pay reduction. The pension scheme used by FDM is not very generous in my opinion - were I to stay with FDM long-term, I would definitely set up a personal pension to compensate for this.
