Pros
The job: Vanguard is a call center. If you start your career on the phones at vanguard (brokerage professional, financial rep, whatever fancy name they want to give it) you will always work in a call center. Sure, you can advance to a different client segment or a different specialty, but you will always be stuck taking 40 client calls a day which consist of mostly non-finance related topics. You will assist the elderly reset their passwords and get yelled at by middle aged men because they misread the directions on a form. You will not be helping people with their financial portfolios, and will only have a handful of “investment guidance” conversations. When you do have those conversations, it will be to meet your impossible quota of personal advisory services leads. It is incredibly difficult to go into a role which qualifies as finance. It is widely known to “real” finance professionals that this job is a joke and not at all what you spent 4 years getting a degree for. I have literally had someone laugh when I told them where I work because this is not real finance. Promotions: Vanguard has the most bizarre method of promoting people. It is mystifying how a manager who sent their direct reports’ performance evaluations out to the whole team can somehow be promoted without issue, yet those who demonstrate all the right skills, meet with all the right people, and say all the right things in an interview are stuck where they are for years. You want to go into leadership to escape the phones? Vanguard has already filled their management positions with 22 year olds right out of college who will do the job for half the price than someone who is actually qualified. Let’s say you’re one of the lucky ones who does get an interview, too bad you’ll be beaten out by someone whose leader is best friends with the hiring manager. I have (mistakenly) witnessed first hand a conversation where I did not get a job because the hiring manager was better friends with the other applicant’s boss. Never mind that I had previously done the job I applied for, all that matters to vanguard is keeping the manager cliques together.
Cons
The pay/benefits: vanguard LOVES to tout that it’s about the total package and that makes up for base pay being low. Guess what, the PTO is average at best and good luck using it. Decide to take a half day to go spend time with your friends/kids/spouse? Oops, can’t leave during the day without it counting as an occurrence. You saved all your vacation time to go visit your dying grandmother during the holidays? Oops again, Vanguard won’t let you leave because they underestimated staffing levels and someone has to be there to take phone calls on Christmas Eve. You’re 15 minutes late because your tire exploded on the freeway but sadly it didn’t injure you enough to justify skipping work? Well you’re better off not coming in at all because Vanguard thinks being late is equally as bad as not showing up. I cannot tell you how the vision/health benefits are because they are useless to me, yet because it’s part of the total package I guess that coverage must be worth $20,000. But at least you have a great 401k and that surely makes up for the salary, right? You’re not entitled to the full thing unless you work there for 6 years, and trust me, you will not win that bet. As for the yearly Partnership bonus, it won’t be paid out until June. This means you have to work half the year to receive a good portion of your salary, and by that point you might as well stay until the next year. Also, you need to work the full year to be eligible for the bonus. So if you started working for the company on January 5th 2020, you won’t be eligible to receive 100% of your bonus until June 2022. My personal favorite Partnership moment was where they announced the bonus multiplier was the lowest it had been in recent years, and in the same sentence announced they were raising Award for Excellence bonuses 20x! For reference, this means 6 managers who excel at sucking up got $20,000 bonuses while the rest of us got screwed. The culture: I’m shocked they don’t have Vanguard red KoolAid on tap. You will have daily huddles where you gather around talking about how great Bob is for hustling 10 clients into an advice service they don’t need, yet you will be questioned about your handle time because you spent too long letting the recent widow vent about her frustrations. If you ever speak your mind or go against the grain, you end up on a blacklist and will never be promoted a level or two beyond where you are now. Recognition is given in the form of movie tickets so you can spend two hours distracting yourself from the perpetual anxiety you feel from your job. Sometimes if you’re lucky you get a voucher for a meal from the cafeteria, where you have a decent chance of getting food poisoning from the raw meat. In conclusion, please do not work here. There are better jobs, you deserve better than to be miserable at work for 8 hours only to come home and be miserable for the other 16 because you’re being worked to death.