Great place to work if you're funded; individual experiences will vary widely - Anonymous employee RTI International Employee Review

4.0
Aug 16, 2010
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

RTI maintains some considerable semblance of being an academic institution, and a non-profit, despite being a very revenue-driven place. Work conditions are very flexible; you can work from home, telecommute from abroad, etc. You can now take up to three weeks of unpaid leave in addition to fairly generous paid leave. You can work with very little supervision and a lot of responsibility.

Cons

Rather bureaucratic and slow; geared to large research projects. Some of the support staff do low-quality work. Very revenue-driven for a non-profit. Difficult to work across different parts of the organization.

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5.0
Jun 8, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

RTI has a good mission

Cons

Adaptation to sudden federal funding loss.

3.0
Jun 15, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Remote work and reasonable working hours

Cons

If you're a PhD who enjoys research and hopes to use empirical research skills at a research institute, you'll likely be disappointed as I was. Projects in my business unit were largely implementation projects that required very little creativity or data analysis. I was told by my manager that empirical-research projects are harder to come by and when those opportunities do arise, everyone wants them. Even then, project directors are very unwilling (in my experience) to let you branch out to other projects. Using any overhead time to work on your own research is also discouraged, so I ended up working on manuscripts in my personal time. And there's no funding to attend conferences either. On top of all of this, constant layoffs create an aura of uncertainty and the feeling that you're lucky to even be there even when compensation for similar roles in private sector is far better.

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