Pros
Incredible and smart people, strong senior management, compassionate and hard-working immediate management, wonderful coworkers, occasional fun events and lunch & learns. Good place to start and to build connections, get a feeling for market research. Interesting studies. Flexibility to work from home when need arises.
Cons
A lot of overtime work, sometimes as much as 12 or 14 hours a day. "Down-time" were weeks where you worked 44-50 hours. Ipsos likes to hire new grads as they are most likely to suffer through the crazy hours for experience. If you're unlucky to work under a workaholic senior management, you will never get their compassion or have work-life balance. Compensation and salary is not competitive. Some departments promote Entry to Intermediate level in 1 year, others in as long as 3 years for the same salary amount. Bonus structure is very rare. People can stay and work for many years at Ipsos to make it to the same level as an outsider who made it there in a much smaller amount of time elsewhere. People leave and do not get replaced, or get replaced months later - by then another person burns out. Remaining employees are expected to pick up their work and do overtime to meet client needs. Ipsos prides themselves in "work flexibility" and they offer the ability for you to work from home, as well as have programs like "Summer Hours", however those always follow with "client needs permitting". If you are very sick but you have an urgent client timeline, guess what - you're working from home to get it done. You wanted to take summer hours and leave early? Guess what, last minute request, you have to stay to get it done. It can get very demoralizing and difficult to plan any resemblance of family or social life around.
