Pros
Lots and lots of PTO, especially if you've been with the bank 6+ years. High turnover leads to opportunities to move around.
Cons
The pay can be embarrassingly low. Once you're with the bank, your chances of receiving fair compensation are slim. The bank will not negotiate salary with current employees, even if they have accepted a promotion within the bank; however, the bank will negotiate salaries with external candidates. Also, annual pay increases seem to be weaker and weaker each year. Many employees will bring home less money in their paychecks next year than they did this year because the cost of our health insurance outpaced our raises. The hiring trend for management positions has been to hire from outside the bank instead of hiring from within. It's pretty difficult to be excited about your career prospects when management specifically wants to bring in candidates from outside the bank. There are so many more managers than there were a couple years ago. Want to get something changed? It has to be approved by a small army of managers. There is so much red tape involved in making minor changes that it's almost not worth it to try anymore. Training has become almost nonexistent. My group has received exactly one training course in the last 2 years, and that turned out to essentially be a sales pitch from an outside vendor. It seems like the bank is in a constant state of systems integration, adding to employee stress. There are too many meaningless conference calls and sometimes change is made just for the sake of change. The two big culture catchphrases, "WOW the customer" and "America's Most Convenient Bank," nave become meaningless. Most of the rules and policies in place that allowed us to make customers exceedingly happy were old Commerce Bank rules, which have been tossed to the side of the road. If anything, we are much less convenient and much less empowered to satisfy customers than we were just a couple years ago.
