ICON reviews

3.5

63% would recommend to a friend

(5,278 total reviews)
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Barry Balfe

51% approve of CEO

50% positive business outlook

ICON has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 5,278 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The ICON employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

5K reviews
1.0
Sep 19, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Could be fast at promoting you into the CRA role from another role.

Cons

No work life balance at all, overwhelming work load, culture of pointing fingers, value quantity over quality, management do not listen to employees, all they care about is you completing your days on site and having the system and reports updated on a daily with no consideration of your days on site being overwhelming. Would not care if you told them you were in an ER. I told my manager once that I was going to be out of office because I was not caught a virus as she was trying to set up a meeting and her answer sick or not we must have the meeting. Didn’t even care to understand the extend of my illness, which sums up the culture here. Very limited contact with your manager but they only appear to blame you for this or that. Study team fast to escalate to managers even before communicating which you which creates a culture of gossip where you can’t trust anyone. Yearly bonus is also based on how many extra on-site visits you do versus how good you are at what you do so with 8 days on site required, you’ll pretty much only have bonus if you live on the road travelling to sites which comes back to the no work-life balance culture here. There’s no consideration for the fact that we have families and life outside of work.

2.0
Oct 3, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Some WFH flexibility; Slight schedule flexibility; Interesting material

Cons

Inconsistent manager feedback; No transparency from management; Very little upward mobility; Ever increasing workload without compensation increase beyond COL increases yearly; Inconsistent policies implementation; Management does not like to provide positive feedback (it is an unofficial policy of theirs); WFH flexibility can be taken away at anytime, though management works from home so much that they lost their office in the building

2.0
Jun 9, 2016

Good place to start career, then leave

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

-Principals really care about their employees and work hard to create a good work environment. -The work is fast-paced and interesting. You have the opportunity to get experience in a range of projects and therapeutic areas. -Great colleagues who work hard to produce quality deliverables. -Flexible schedules and ability to work from home. -Promotions come quickly but for reasons that are cons, in both senses of the word.

Cons

-ICON's big solution to its problems is to restructure top level management constantly, leading to a rotating cast of global heads and VPs who don't stay in positions long enough to accomplish anything substantial or follow through on commitments. -Pay is well below market and ICON has avoided benchmarking its employees' salaries for years, yet constantly maintains they care about retention. -Turnover is astronomical, resulting in a situation where current employees are constantly getting more work dumped on them from colleagues who have quit. -Performance reviews center on unattainable metrics and scores are compressed into a limited range in order to justify laughably small (i.e. below inflation) annual raises and bonuses. - Promotion-based salary increases are small and, by internal rules, make the promoted employee ineligible for any other raises during the next 6 months. Managers appear to time promotions to take advantage of this loophole to deny annual and department-wide raises.

Viewing 25 - 27 of 5,278 Reviews

Glassdoor has 6,512 ICON reviews submitted anonymously by ICON employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if ICON is right for you.