1) Unfortunately Nielsen has no desire to retain or develop its people, so the future of your career is in your own hands. It is difficult to get even direct managers interested in helping you plan the next step of your career. Long story short if you are not up for the challenge do not overstay your welcome or take that offer you got from that other company and save yourself the headache.
2) Onboarding is kind of a joke. If you like a good challenge EVERYDAY and love the "struggle" or "sink or swim" method of learning this could be the place for you, but I'd say everyone becomes overwhelmed by the amount of self learning that is required to get up and running at this place in the beginning.
3) Management leaves a lot to be desired as well. Nielsen likes to promote from within and in many cases has taken someone who was a good analyst and promoted them into a people manager position. As you may have guessed from the point above, Nielsen doesn't provide the most comprehensive training, so most of these managers have no formal training nor have they had the time to engage in extracurricular activities that would have taught them the leadership skills to be good managers of people. Managers are also not required to complete advanced degrees such as MBAs to be promoted to management positions. All of this adds up to: you could get lucky and have one of the few managers who just inherently "gets it" or be prepared to manage your manager every day of your career (this is far more likely to be the case).
4) Work/life balance is not valued at Nielsen - you will work long, unpredictable hours at times.You will not work less than 40 hours a week unless you are on vacation and you will likely never actually get to use sick time. You will be working through flu season even if you are doing it at home with a fever. Just plan on giving up your hobbies, friends, and free time before you start. There are basically three schools of thought on work/life balance at Nielsen: 1) "I do care that you worked late so don't bother mentioning it" 2) " I worked long hours when I was the lower man on the totem pole so I don't see why you shouldn't too" and 3) "We pay you to be here not the other way around so you should be grateful to have a job". There may be a few people who say work life balance is good, but I doubt they are hitting their revenue goals for the year.
5) Compensation is great if you are fresh out of school; in fact starting salary is not really far off entry level salary at many leading companies. However, while other companies give healthy raises and bonuses each year, Nielsen does not. So prepare for the disappointment of learning your friend who took that job at that other company makes a bunch more money than you after a couple of years. Also, if you come in with experience or an advanced degree you WILL be underpaid (paid like the people straight out of school), yet you will be expected to do more and do it faster. Don't expect promotions, raises, and bonuses to be handed out. Be thankful if you ever get one because they are few and far between...supposedly we are a meritocracy but have seen no evidence of this. Nielsen has an inconsistent, arbitrary way of evaluating employees to justify not rewarding them. Make sure you negotiate for a better starting salary and ask for a signing bonus before you sign that offer letter.
6) Nielsen has a really strange culture that is constantly changing and not for the better. At the helm you have some former GE folks who love implementing BPI to make more of whatever you are selling in a shorter amount of time, outsourcing stuff to save a buck, and forcing out what they have determined to be the bottom 10% out of the company. Combine that with the fact the company itself is a hodgepodge of smaller companies that were merged with Nielsen or acquired by Nielsen and you have numerous subcultures that don't exactly play nice together. Its like the craziest three-legged race you can image where the participants can't seem to find their stride.
7) While employees at other companies may complain that they have old outdated systems that aren't updated because their leadership believes "if it ain't broke don't fix it", Nielsen is a fan of "it's been more than 60 seconds since we tried to improve something for no good reason". Once you've mastered a system, tool, or process, it's just a matter of time before you have to relearn a completely new version of something that accomplishes the same end. Any time savings that could have been realized by the new tool or process is lost during the time you have to figure out how to use or implement the new tool or process. Nothing is intuitive. It will take multiple tries to get up to speed, and right about THAT time a new version of what you just mastered will roll out and you get to start the learning process all over again.
