Great Minds reviews

I waited more than a year after being laid off to write this review because I didn't want to do it while the wound was still fresh. Over the course of nearly a decade with this company, the same mistakes were repeated time and time again. In the beginning, it truly felt like it was about the teachers and the students; somewhere along the way, it became about the money and everything changed. There has never been any real direction, thanks in large part to a CEO who consistently makes decisions on a whim that must be followed if you want to keep your job. Those who push back are no longer employed, so the people who could make decent decisions never feel empowered to do so. HR is not a real department. They do not take complaints seriously, nor employee development. They say they want people to succeed, but do nothing to help with that -- even when asked for specific training. I have never in my life met a group of people who can create a word salad like they can, who can absolutely avoid answering direct questions, and who (in some cases of employees in that department) outright lie and deny documented information; it's an art, truly. Each quarterly meeting, department heads come on screen and say how well the company is doing financially, what great numbers and projections there are. Then, mass layoffs occur because the company is not solvent. How does that even happen? Either you have money or you don't, but don't lie about it with the promise of a performance bonus and then slam the door in employee's faces. All you have to do is look up the company's tax and compensation filings and look at the numbers--the math doesn't math. Countless restructures and countless layoffs later and this company is in no better position than it was when my position was eliminated. It's sad. You'd think the people who signed off on branding the company as a "knowledge company" would have the common sense to look at the balance sheet and figure it out.

This job was truly a dream job when I first started years ago. Now, the curriculum writing process has become a frenzied, fast paced mess with absurd deadlines and workloads (due to the fact that work kept getting delayed and delayed because of poor leadership, and there is little time left to complete very large scale projects). People are promoted to middle management, but then those roles are not replaced with new hires, meaning there are FAR, FAR too many middle managers in the curriculum development team, who frankly don't seem to do much. When I started, managers were still heavily involved in the writing process, and actually did quite a bit of the revising and writing of content themselves. Now, most of the work is pushed back onto the curriculum developers at the bottom of the ladder. Feedback is inconsistent and conflicting from one manager to another, which makes revising written work feel somewhat impossible. The recent announcement of the company wide "reunification process" has added a layer of stress, panic, and negativity to the culture. We will have to reapply and re-interview for our own roles sometime next year, meaning that it's going to hang over our heads for the next 6+ months. We don't know if there will be massive layoffs, paycuts, or any other negative outcome because leadership won't be straightforward and honest with us about this "reunification" process. Despite this "reunification," the company continues to hire more people, some of whom may not be aware that they are walking into a role with an extremely uncertain future.