Springer Nature reviews

Long working hours, low salary for education level, difficult to progress

The work itself is very dull and mostly exists of handling e-mails and putting data from one system to another, and so it's easy to be replaced. Though they still hire well-educated people for a job that’s under the academic level, which is factual. So it happens more often that employers while being in this position internally apply for a higher position. Therefore, I could say the job as a project coordinator is a good basis as a stepping stone. On the other side, the job itself can be ideal for people who want to focus more on their family/personal life instead of a career and are looking for decent employment to balance it out. The biggest con is most definitely the almost inability for new ideas or creative proposals. A lot of employers work there for 20+ years and many of them are used to a certain pace of work. It’s sometimes hard to ‘modernize’ the work environment. Example: As project coordinator is a very technical, grey and detailed job the idea came up more often to create a video tutorial to make it easier to learn all the systems. But as mentioned, their sceptic view of thinking out of the box made it hard to put this idea into action at that time. Though they do show motivation to come up with new ideas when comparing with competitor Elsevier. Furthermore, the old team was working there for many years and knew all the ins and outs, and as we were new we had to make ourselves familiar with the systems and the work. The higher-ups could react negatively to our manager when certain details were not done sufficiently yet. It’s disappointing that certain higher-ups didn’t want to understand that we had to adjust. I guess it comes back to the fact that many work there for so long and were not used to new teams. This was, however, often vaguely communicated to us and found out later that they were not happy and expected ‘perfect’, even though you did not feel a certain pressure. On a side note, when making mistakes (or they’re not happy with your work) a lot of times you’re getting aware of this very late so that makes it harder to better yourself (in other words, you don’t always get a chance to show that you can put more effort). Important: The biggest issue with being a project coordinator is that they can easily replace you. It’s basically systematic work, mouse clicks, putting data/files from one system to another, answering e-mails, etc. You don’t need a degree for this. Everybody is able to do this. However, as it is very detailed and precise it’s also easy to make a wrong click or make small mistakes by accident. As I mentioned earlier that’s not always seen very well and also told very late. There was one instance where I was made aware of a wrong click (I submitted something that should not be submitted yet). This happened in January and I was told in June. Everyday you maybe do a hundred cases which makes it very hard to remember a submit-click from 6 months ago. To give an idea, it’s like as if you work as a waiter at a restaurant every day and your manager asks you in June why you didn’t fill a customer’s wine glass in January. And a precise answer is expected. I believe the manager gets pressured by higher-ups but due to lack of communication and honesty, it’s of course hard to read between the lines.