Morningstar Development Program - MDP Morningstar Employee Review

Poorly developed products -- M* does not attract top talent on the development side because of low industry pay. The products are mostly outdated, though they tend to function better than the new ones which emphasize looks over performance. Issues with the products tend to take a long time to get resolved because of a lack of resources. Low pay -- While there are decent benefits to help mitigate this fact, the truth is that they are really falling behind here. The low pay leads to high turnover and a loss of potentially attracting much-needed talent. Extremely conservative business structure -- This falls in line with the others. Morningstar has a very conservative fiscal model in that they tend to underinvest in just about everything (except for the office decor and furniture which is shockingly nice). The most prominent underinvestment is in its people, and this bleeds through to everything else. This leads to what feels like growth at a glacial speed. MDP Program -- I've heard they changed their advertising for this program since I applied last year, and I cannot speak to what prospectives are currently told. That being said, when I applied in 2016 what was told to us is drastically different than what we got. We were told that there are many different first positions open to MDPs; while this may have been true in the past, all current MDPs are stuck on product support for their first rotations. During orientation, we were told most MDPs rotate to their second position at around ~8 months; unfortunately, most MDPs tend to now stay on the phones for 12+ months, and then end up taking a second rotation they don't really want just so they can get off of the phones. In order to rotate, all MDPs must hire internally for specific positions. Given that there are a lot of MDPs, we are all competing for a relatively scarce number of positions; the equity and fund analyst positions are the most sought-after, and there are probably around 8-10 that open up per year. There have been MDPs who have waited on the phones for 16 months to land one of these positions. Finally, the managers of the support teams are unsurprisingly interested in solely the performance of the support teams, as this is what they are judged on. While this is obviously good for the business, it also means that they have little incentive to care about MDP rotations and career progression. In fact, a lot of the time managers get in the way of MDP development because they are worried about staffing and performance issues.