Unstable Marketing Department and Company Values - Marketing Galileo Learning Employee Review

2.0
Sep 27, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Galileo is in an interesting period of time where there are opportunities to get into an HQ role. The company survived the pandemic and a Ch. 11 bankruptcy by, finally, implementing online products that pivoted the business model from a 3-month summer season to year-round structure. This definitely came at a price—the company endured laying off well over 50% of its employees, leaving the few remaining to keep everything afloat (during a pandemic of uncertainty and dealing with our own personal lives). While this was a great challenge to achieve and put under our belt of professional development, we endured over a year of working the equivalent of 3 jobs and gave up our work-life balance, only to get barely any tangible or worthwhile gratitude in return.

Cons

If you are interviewing for roles particular on the marketing team, I strongly urge prospects to look elsewhere—you essentially are going to waste a lot of time here. I entered in 2 years ago in the same spot the marketing team is now in once again (and not for the first time). It was just me, the VP of Marketing, and two other veterans who the VP expressed to me they wanted to fire because they weren’t at the level to their standard. At first, I thought this awkward cadence was just coming from her, where as our team grew and I started collaborating with VP cross-functional roles, the treatment of not taking marketing seriously, nor failing to recognize the value the team brought to the table, created a huge toxic work environment on many levels. I had 3 bosses within 2nd first year on the team. In the last year with my 3rd boss, I finally felt things were gelling together—we were a small but mighty 3 person team that some how crushed all goals, had summer camp sold out, and driving revenue to bounce back from the pandemic shut downs. Not only were we performing well, but our team was finally in a spot where we felt nothing but positivity and support. For no true reason out of nowhere, our CEO pushed to hire a new Head of Marketing instead of promote the one who had clearly proved for over a year that they deserved the role. The current HMO immediately started without setting up any meetings to get to know the team. Particularly for my role, they openly told me they went to their personal design colleagues to begin a rebrand of our guidelines, rather than start with working with the talented team of veterans that are already there. More so in the design world, Galileo has a history of rebranding and redesigning high-level platforms like the website nearly every year. Part of it is due to the product evolvement, but there is absolutely no support or grasp of design-thinking with best practices for UX and longevity. Essentially, you’ll be feeling like a hamster sprinting in a wheel, but not getting anywhere. There’s also a history of XF teams not understanding design falls under design and marketing—a lot of folks go behind marketing’s back to create designs and pieces that are off brand, creating a bigger divide and inefficient work/time management. Galileo are complete hypocrites championing diversity and inclusion, where I witnessed verbal boundaries crossed to multiple poc employees. Leadership’s answer was to “let go” the problem source and one employee who was mostly receiving the abuse. Essentially, they got rid of the problem and swept it under the rug instead of taking action and making change. The majority of the employees of color have left the company by now. I barely got any breaks and was called a lot on the weekends and PTO days to do work when it could wait. With a culmination of unfair compensation and no true perks to balance it, terrible camaraderie, lack of diversity, and a constant high-turnover rate directly on marketing, this is a recipe for a toxic work environment and working here is more draining and taxing than anything positive. You not only will lose out on professional development and growth, but you will find yourself stressed and jaded approaching your job on a daily basis. Definitely spare yourself the trouble!

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Galileo Learning Response
4y
Thanks for your review, we value your perspective and are disheartened to hear that this was your experience. As you mentioned, this is a time of growth for Galileo, so we’d like to reach out and learn more about your experience as we pride ourselves on a positive work environment, strong management and building consistency across teams. We believe in thoughtful approaches to both effecting change and providing feedback, so we’ll share your thoughts with the appropriate members of our team, especially our marketing department. In addition, we take inclusion and diversity concerns seriously here at Galileo, which is why we are doubling down on our efforts to train our teams on unconscious bias, culturally sensitive curriculum and conversation, and building inclusive communities, though there is always more work to be done. We’d welcome an email at outreach@galileo-learning.com so we can listen and learn more about how to grow as individuals and as a company.

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