PPD was great when it was a privately held company. However, it is clear that Marc Casper does not care about his employees, only about acquiring more companies that he knows nothing about and doesn’t care about running well. There was recently a round of layoffs which was not communicated well, and the day after, an email was sent out announcing that Thermo Fisher had acquired some company for a billion dollars. Such poor and insensitive timing. My team’s morale has suffered greatly due to these layoffs and everyone is in fear that they’ll be next. In terms of the day-to-day, your experience will be highly dependent on your direct people manager, your client(s), and oversight director. If you have a good combination of the three, your work life balance could be ok. Even if all three are good, processes are constantly changing and it’s impossible to keep up with. I spend more time trying to figure out how to do my job than actually doing it. It also takes forever to get anything done because resources can only be requested just-in-time, even if you know you’ll need a resource months in advance. You don’t get a resource if you don’t escalate, which defeats the purpose of escalation. Every ethics submission is late due to not having resources on time, ICF reviews take an extraordinarily long time, CRAs are not assigned in time. As a PM I am running out of excuses for why things are taking so long. It is embarrassing when I could do a submission myself in 5 minutes but am not allowed to due to some obscure internal process that only certain roles are able to do. We are so desperate for new business that every bid is a “must win” but project teams are not set up to succeed after studies are awarded. Budgets are not initially bid sufficiently to support the work - we overpromise and under deliver. Benefits have also worsened since the acquisition. Previously, PTO started at 22 days and we could roll over up to 80 hours, or sell back unused PTO. Now it starts at 15 days for new hires and no more rolling over or sell backs. They also took away MLK day as a holiday - who does that? Thermo Fisher claims to value diversity and inclusion but then takes away the only holiday of the year that celebrates civil rights. There is so much more I could say about how awful PPD has become - stay away at all costs.
