Pros
I am learning a lot about the business world and how it functions--something that I had zero experience with or knowledge of having graduated from a liberal arts college with a traditional academic major. Learning a ton about different industries, supply chains, and how roles in different companies work. This job is communication and organization boot camp. I'm learning to function at a level that blows my mind, and I graduated in the top 2% of my elite liberal arts college with multiple extracurriculars and a thriving social life (read: I thought I was pretty good at time management before GLG). This is a great job for learning how to have a job--being professional, collaborative, and on top of every detail at all times. I have an incredible manager. (It seems to me that about half of the managers are good at GLG, the other half are just great individual contributors who are thrown into mgmt roles because of their high metrics). I've worked at GLG for less than a year and have continued learning at an exponential rate, which I believe is 90% attributable to my manager. We recently switched teams around and I requested to stay under her, which upper management honored. Good thing they did, because I'm not sure how likely I'd be to stay on under someone else. I feel as though she is the biggest pro for me at GLG at this point--I want to stay and learn from her until she leaves (or until 2-3 years go by) and then I'm gone too.
Cons
The work-life balance is absolutely horrendous. First 6 months you are limited to 5 hours of overtime a week. I often had to lie about how much I had gotten done at work so I wouldn't go over the limit. When things got desperate metrics-wise, I grit my teeth and worked from home to avoid the consequences of not hitting my numbers. Since my recent promotion (no more overtime limits, you need to work when clients need you) it has gotten so much worse. Worked a 10 hour day on MLK day after being told I was "skeleton crew," which I expected to mean I was just needed to take care of urgent stuff/email clients back. Emphasis is on speed at GLG. If you aren't the type of person who likes to bang out mediocre work and be done with it, this is not the place for you. Be prepared to be forced to give about 60% effort on 8 projects at once instead of 100% effort on 4. This is probably the part about this job I hate the most. You are evaluated on cold hard numbers, nothing else. I hate this. In a meeting where I received negative feedback from my manager and her manager, I was told that the promotion process was "holistic" and that there were some soft skills I needed to improve in order to be promoted. Together with my manager I worked hard to implement their feedback. Two months later when the promotion process came around, there was NO OPTION for me to present qualitative reasons why I deserved to be promoted. There was a section where you could write comments and were limited to 500 characters. I was able to write 3 sentences. I spoke to both my manager and her manager inquiring how qualitative elements were going to be considered given that there was no place for them on the self evaluation form. They both told me not to worry about it. In the end I was promoted. Pretty sure there is zero qualitative consideration when they decide who to promote given that half or even more than half of the managers in this company are completely awful and have no idea how to manage another person let alone a team or a unit. Really hard to care about "doing well" here when you know that evaluation process is such trash and that if your numbers drop or your manager doesn't like you you'll have absolutely zero ability to give context when promotion periods come around. Lastly, but probably most importantly, there is ZERO diversity at GLG. I can count one hand and still have a couple of fingers left the number of non-white people I see regularly. Honestly, it's depressing.
