Pros
Coworkers, work from home, and benefits To provide some context: The entirety of my time at TRI from onboarding to my last day was remote due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This was my first time working in a corporate environment. For the most part, I enjoyed working with my colleagues and learning about the clinical research process. My coworkers were incredibly supportive and I appreciated their help, kindness, and insights despite having never met them in person. Remote work definitely made the training more difficult (since it is not always easy to convey some aspects of a task over a virtual meeting), but with experience the workload became manageable.
Cons
Management lacks in crucial aspects of leadership: communication, transparency, honesty, and mentorship Just like any new job, I made some mistakes initially, but nothing that ever compromised client relations, contracts, projects, etc. Any performance issues that I was aware of were quickly addressed and fixed. If there were any other problems, it was never brought to my attention by my colleagues, manager or other supervisors in any form. My manager even told the team that our overall performance improved as a result of the measures we put in place. Despite my manager claiming that they wanted to "mentor" the associates, I never really experienced this myself. It was even worse so in the week leading up to my last day. When I was asking them genuine questions relating to my development and growth, I was given the cold shoulder. Unless the issue at hand was related to the client, they barely responded to my messages. It even came to the point where I was not included in conversations that were directly related to my dealings with the client. I could feel that something was up, but chalked it up to my manager being busy. When I received a meeting invite from HR, it confirmed my suspicions. I asked my manager directly about this message and they responded with: "As far as I know, the meeting is to discuss your performance." My manager left all the talking to the HR representative, which made the situation even more difficult. I would have appreciated my manager telling me directly what went wrong rather than hiding behind someone else. The HR representative had also told me during this meeting that my probationary period (TRI has a 90 day probationary period for all new employees) was extended another month due to my performance issues, which my manager never made me aware of and so I had no idea that I was in jeopardy until my last day. After what would have presumably been my 90th day, I was allowed to continue working and I assumed that I had passed. If it was true that my probationary period was extended another month, then I wasn't able to even finish working that last month, which had another 2 weeks left. Looking back on this situation, I realized that TRI treats their employees as nothing more than disposable cogs in the machine. They are Corporate America at its worst. Apply here as a last resort and with a backup plan.