Pros
I had some truly lovely colleagues. I was part of a superb team. Some members of the team were particularly talented and a real privilege to work with. The office building itself was lovely. They gave me a foot in the door to the London Market insurance industry, and A J Gallagher are a superb brand to have on the CV. The people running AJG International (the very senior management, not the people running the department I was in) were actually very friendly, down-to-earth, charming people.
Cons
The department I was in is really badly run. The departmental management team were overly negative - far too eager to criticise than to praise. My department had this ethos of leaving the best work to the "seniors" They also did not put enough emphasis on building / maintaining relationships, meaning they often stopped myself and others from meeting our own clients even! This led to a feeling that you were deliberately being kept down / held back. There was a significant disconnect between remuneration and performance. This was best exemplified when my department were hugely over budget one year and yet the subsequent pay increase and bonus were very disappointing. The MD of the department decided everyone's bonuses, including his own, causing resentment. There was a total lack of training. There were no financial incentives to do the insurance exams. This is totally at odds with the rest of the industry. The above naturally caused very poor morale among the team for the entire duration I was there. Needless to say the department's continual success is, in spite of, not due to how it is run. Lastly, and this is not specific to my department, AJG's tagline of 'Business without Barriers' is hugely ironic. Everything felt needlessly more difficult than it ought to be.
