Dangerous Elephants in the Room
Pros
Review is only relevant for Implementation Project Managers: - Opportunities to learn about healthcare industry - Pay is strong, especially considering the low cost of living in Madison, WI - If your LinkedIn is up to date, employers will begin reaching out to you after about a year of work at Epic, knowing that if you can handle the workload there, you can likely handle the workload elsewhere - Healthcare benefits are amongst the best of any employer in the area - Paid training for certifications that can be used in the future - Potential for luck of the draw to get you matched with a good Application Manager, Team Leader, or Mentor. - Travel staff are available 24/7 and can help if there is ever an issue - If your career lacks direction, the singular growth structure might give you an option to consider - CEO generally seems that she cares about charity and doing good
Cons
- Little diversity - Non-Transparent HR Processes, various stories circulate online of HR giving very vague, unclear reasonings of their decisions. - There are still more lucrative options out there through third-party companies if you obtain the Epic Certification. - Hard-Skills gained are mostly only useful to Epic. The software taught is usually built internally at Epic and not as strong as third party counterparts. However, if you are very new to Microsoft Office products like Excel, you can gain a few pointers here and there. - Soft Skills plateau gained plateau very quickly. They do not teach real project management (Lean, Agile, etc) nor real project management software (Asana, Atlassian, etc) - Very dangerous management structure: Application Managers are often matched one-to-one with Application Coordinators per project, leading to a "luck of the draw scenario" and very few third-party opinions in incidents. The managers can often create the image they want to the outside parties. Stories circulate of managers who have mistreated or even harassed their employees to very little consequence. Normally, the worst that happens is that the employee is moved to another project and the incident is swept under the rug. If a manager is strong in the Epic software, her/his job is usually protected. - Other stories have included a project team hazing a rotational training group, and HR only sending an email asking them not to do it again. - Managers are not taught real project management nor are they taught how to actually manage other employees. Their promotion comes from their ability to solve problems in the Epic software and minimal project management ability. If someone is more adept to a change of roles, the process for doing so is very convoluted and usually leads to a person moving back to entry-level pay. - They intentionally hire young and inexperienced workers with little to no real outside job experience nor leadership experience outside of "president of sorority/fraternity/club."
