Not as Great or Terrible as Advertised
Pros
-Work From Home (this is also a con so be wary) -Decent place to learn the benefits admin game -For the most part your coworkers are nice people -If you are employed for them for the entire calendar year, they'll add an extra 2.5% of your salary to your 401k.
Cons
-Working from home has resulted in teams being geographically fractured and the company is doing little to develop a working culture around WFH. I never once saw my coworkers faces in the last 5 years I was working there. I wouldn't know who they were if I ever walked passed them on the street. In addition, this has led to most people working solely for themselves and not for others. It is a very difficult atmosphere to work as a team. -Like most reviews, Alight is now private equity and the primary focus is profit. This leads to: -Poor pay. You'll really need to play the game of leveraging competing offers against the company to get paid. I had to do it 2 times to make my desired salary. -Outdated technology. Alight still uses a proprietary TBA software developed in the 90s to administer benefits. In addition, their customer inquiry tracking system is out of a Lotus Notes database, which is an old database software that IBM sold off and stopped supporting over a decade ago. -Poorly tracked metrics. Alight loves showing you how many clients are "green" but the reality is few, if any, truly achieve that status because colleagues know how to manipulate the old technology to give a desirable result. For example, most workflows are simply marked external because they aren't tracked as closely which will significantly improve the team's turnaround time on internal participant inquiries. -Heavy offshoring. The focus is on developing offshore colleagues out of India, but the cultural gap between America and India is literally as far as the physical distance between the two countries. A lot of Indian colleagues either can't or simply won't do the work assigned to them then ignore you when you call them out. -Disengaged and overworked American workforce that routinely ignores emails and messages. This happened so often that I eventually started participating in the farce. If it's really important they'll send it again, right? -Because salaried employees are incredibly overworked, there is little to no time to train new colleagues. This really bothered me the most as a client manager. I felt an incredible amount of guilt about failing new hires because I simply couldn't find the time to train them properly. -Lastly, because of the poorly skilled offshore colleagues and poorly motivated American colleagues, costly mistakes are rampant and a daily occurrence. I basically lost my sanity sweeping numerous issues under the rug and straight up lying to my clients and senior managers in order to maintain a positive relationship. Outside of the issues that come with private equity, it is a service-based job that sacrifices the satisfaction of the employee in order to satisfy participants and clients. To further this, you will be working in the large market arena, servicing some very prestigious companies. Your contacts at this company will straight up bully and strongarm you simply because they work for a fortune 100 company such as Verizon or Citibank (which Alight lost as major clients years ago, but you get what I'm saying). As other reviews have noted, it is very difficult to advance past the client manager role because senior client managers and client leaders have worked there for 20+ years and are very comfortable in their roles. The problem with people aging into these roles is they become extremely out of touch with the day-to-day struggles of the front-line workers AND they become technologically illiterate. Many senior client managers I worked with were glorified paper pushers that had little to no knowledge of excel or SQL which are absolutely paramount to being successful at this type of work. Unfortunately, these are not the workers being laid-off even though it's obvious they should be.
