Terrible treatment, terrible pay, terrible schedule
Pros
The instructors are a very friendly group of people to work alongside.
Cons
I wish there was a way to give zero stars in the ratings on here. The corporate management will lie to you straight to your face. They have been telling us for 2 years now that "big changes are coming" and "this is the year of the instructor." There have been big changes but, not one of them has been positive. They are liars and the employees don't trust anything they say. Treatment- the Corporate and Center managers treat you as an object. They do not view an employee as a human. They will expect you to be available 12 hours a day everyday 24/7/365. They do not give you the tools to succeed, and when you mess up, they will go as far as giving you a pay cut. The schedule is horrendous, they will work you 24/7/365 with up to 15 hours in the center per day. For obvious reasons, they cannot attract new employees. Therefore, when someone leaves, your schedule will get even worse. They are more frequently having instructors work 3 clients per day in the sims and working 2 full recurrent classes each day. They will not give you credit for any time other than the time you spend in front of a client. You will be expected to do all client prep, all paperwork, records, and any on the job training without getting credit for it. When you interview, they will tell you that you're going to work 900 hours of recorded time per year. Most instructors are working 1,300 hours of DAL time per year. DAL time is the recorded time or time in front of the client. If you do 1,300 hours of DAL, then you will actually work well over 2,200 hours per year. If you're scheduled to work from 0800-1700, you will show around 0700 to prepare for the client, then the sim breaks for your 0900 sim session. If it takes 4-5 hours to fix, they will expect you to continue with the clients once the sim is fixed. Therefore, between preparing for the client before hand, taking a 5 hour delay, finally doing the sim session, then doing all the records, you will walk out of the center at 2300 that night. It is just expected, they do not care if you have kids that need picked up, or if you had plans setup for after your scheduled time. They do not care. The pay is extremely below the industry standard and what your peers are making doing the same work for the competitors. They pay in some programs 40% less than what CAE pays their instructors. Again you will work an ungodly schedule and you will not make an extra dime for it. The annual pay raises are a complete joke, if you get a pay raise, it will be between 0.5%-3% max. My year five pay raise was $970. That equated to an extra $58/per month. The interesting thing about FSI is they charge customers an average of 40% more than CAE charges. So, FSI pays their instructors 40-50% less than CAE but, they charge the customers up to 50% more. FSI corporate management is all about maximizing profit at all cost, they do not care at all about the employees QOL. Most of the program managers are the equivalent of a Captain on a sinking ship. They try their best but, there's no way for them to do their job. A lot of them are working as instructors in the sims and classrooms just to try and accommodate the number of clients. Therefore, it's impossible for them to be program managers. They are extremely cheap. The computer operating systems the instructors use are 10 years old. When you have to locate records for your client, you will be expected to look in numerous different places. The instructors are setup to fail and when you fail, they will punish you for it. To anyone considering going to FSI, do not sign their 2 year contract. They will lie to you about your working conditions, your job scope, and schedule. The only reason they need you to sign the contract is because they know you will be miserable and they want to try and trap you. FSI is a miserable place to work, do not get trapped.
