Very difficult to move up from the bottom
Pros
Hours are incredibly flexible and the colleagues are wonderful people to work beside and very open and friendly. It's a great place to recommend to friends who need work but not as a permanent solution. Ipsos is a job, not a career.
Cons
I have been working at Ipsos for over three years now and have noticed that moving up through pay-grades or job ranks seems to be based almost entirely on how often you spend time with your superiors in a social setting. There are a huge number of very skilled researchers who have been working consistent hours and are still at entrance level in regards to pay and job responsibility. Considering the high-volume demand of the work and the long hours demanded the pay is really very low. Low level employees are also treated with a shocking lack of respect by superiors who seem to believe that those below them are intellectually inferior and will often make patronizing comments. It can take over a year before you really start to feel that your presence is appreciated and you can turn to supervisors for help. As for the interviews themselves, they are often ridiculously lengthy, repetitive and needlessly invasive. In many situations where we require postcodes we have also recently been pushing for house numbers which can put people at ill-ease (understandably). There are many instances where instructions and demands from clients are impossible or take away from the quality of the work and many questions are not needed and add pointlessly to the length of a survey that the participant may only dubiously wish to take part in.
