Pros
Your experience at RTI is hugely dependent on your manager and the team you roll up under. RTI has several different business units which each have their own cultures. I worked in the administrative/corporate BU, specifically in Corporate Communications. We worked with people in most of the BUs on their various communication needs, so I also got a good sense of how the different spaces operated. In terms of Marketing/Comms teams, I would say SSES was the best BU to work in and with and IDG was the worst. Corp Comms fell somewhere in the middle. Overall, RTI is an EXCELLENT place to work. Great benefits, great company culture, extremely flexible/reasonable WFH policy, strong organizational focus on EDIB and opportunities for self-starters to get involved in things like Employee Resource Groups and form meaningful relationships across the institute outside their departments. I really enjoyed the CEO. He seems like a kind, thoughtful man who genuinely cares and wants to leverage his position to make a positive impact. He’s very reasonable and even-tempered and has provided a lot of support for RTI’s EDIB staff to grow and shape the company culture. He also makes an effort to remember the names of lower level employees too, which sounds minor but I think is a big deal for someone is a position of power at such a huge company. He did a good job acknowledging and honoring the disappointment that many employees felt when he, another straight, white male, was first appointed as CEO. He didn’t shy away from the hard questions or seek to downplay them, which gave me a lot of respect for him. There are more amazing people working at RTI than I can count, and the work RTI is doing across its many practice areas is incredibly impactful and important in so many ways. I loved so many things about working there. Get a solid manager on a solid team, and you’ll have a great experience.
Cons
Like so many large organizations, RTI struggles to be nimble. The many channels you have to go through to get anything done by the book can be exhausting, slowing down productivity and reducing efficiency. That’s probably why they also have such a problem with departments “going rogue” and doing things outside of the approved channels or methods in order to do them faster. That being said though, it was always odd to me how siloed the various BUs and departments were at RTI. Many departments just sort of did their own things without any pushback from leadership. Department leads would even hire their own staff to complete work that was supposed to be done by existing staff in other departments, and no one would stop them. IDG in particular was known for this. This led to the right hand often not knowing what the left hand was doing within the same organization, resulting in haphazard, inefficient processes.
