Pros
- Fantastic team culture and support from managers; managers truly care about their team and work hard to bring people together, and recognise their strengths. - Incredibly smart, collaborative and hard-working individuals, and not a lot of power-plays going on; everybody genuinely wants to do their best and work together. - Big spotlight on inclusive culture and diversity, and not just in a tokenistic way. Team is diverse in terms of gender, race and sexuality. - Completely remote, but can go into an office if you want to. Pearson respects their employees enough to let them decide how they want to work and have supported flexible working for many years prior to covid. - Lots of opportunities for professional development and support to try new things. - Rapidly shifting from a traditional publisher to an educational technology company, and not stuck in the past at all. - Highly organised processes for everything, which makes it easier to do your job, and lots of support from very skilled project managers.
Cons
- At times, there can be too much collaboration and not enough ownership of product initiatives. It's hard to make decisions and move anything forward without consulting a million stakeholders. - High pressure on publishing team to justify their decisions and every stakeholder has strong opinions, which can bog down progress in all the details. - The number one problem is remuneration and promotions. Remuneration is disgustingly low compared to similar roles in the tech industry. It can take forever to get a payrise, and there is a limit on how much your salary can increase, so if you start off low, you're basically screwed. No transparency around how to achieve a promotion and not a lot of support to do so. - Not enough resources - overall, there is low job retention due to the low salaries and people who quit are usually not replaced. If they are, it isn't for about 6 months (sometimes years!). Instead, work is simply shifted around the team, which makes everybody less efficient. - Not enough investment into tech. Pearson want to be an educational technology company but haven't invested in an authoring tool that can actually do the things the market wants, or resources to develop high-quality videos. This means it is very difficult for the product team to create high-quality learning experiences that justify the significant costs associated with Pearson products.