The short time that I’ve worked at IQPC was the most emotionally and mentally challenging time that I’ve ever had to endure in my entire professional career. I’ve channeled an inner strength from working there that I never knew I had. Leaving there was the most liberating and rejuvenating feeling. Heed my warning, and stay at your current miserable job, or better yet, unemployed.
1. Office: A big boiler-room open floor-plan with 200 people crammed in pods. No privacy, loud, hectic, constantly under management’s eye, and impossible to accomplish any work with people on phones all day all around you. The kitchen is a little dark hole in the wall with a crappy coffee machine that pours out mud. You’ll be making multiple trips across the street to buy your own. Also, there are no cups at the water cooler. BYOC. Outdated computers, outdated technology, outdated systems and software – you work off 1 tiny computer monitor from early 2000s’. Management should practice what they preach and attend their own Future Offices event.
2. Turnover: It’s almost impossible to find someone that’s worked there longer than 8 months! As a matter of fact, when you hit your one-year mark, you receive an edible fruit basket, and after 5 years, you are rewarded a watch! It’s survival of the fittest and favorites. It is totally common to see people quit and get fired weeks/months into their time employed here. A couple people have told me that they don’t even bother getting to know anyone new until they’ve passed their 3-month probation mark, because chances are, they wont be here after that! It’s a revolving door. You cannot make it through ONE single conference without either the producer or the marketer dropping off, and then the whole conference sits in limbo until it eventually gets cancelled. And then the cycle continues to repeat itself. And it will always be your fault for the conference failing.
3. Management: I have never in my entire life been treated so shabbily, been condescended to, and disrespected so by senior management. They use fear and humiliation tactics in order to get you to perform harder. They are straight up BULLIES that belittle you and verbally abuse you when you don’t meet their unrealistic expectations. It is totally common to see people having breakdowns and panic attacks in the hallway or stairwell, and feelings of worthlessness and that nothing is ever good enough. It is a complete HR nightmare - that's most likely why they don't have an HR department. Management plays favoritism and is very cliquey with only a selected few. It is extremely unprofessional and their behavior would never be tolerated in a normal environment.
4. Weekly Meetings: I wouldn’t wish a weekly meeting on my worst enemy. It’s basically one full hour of being locked in the room with management telling you how poorly of a job you are doing and how behind you are in downloads, (which you will always be – no matter how hard you try). Nothing is ever good enough, you are a “disappointment”, “this is unacceptable” and “what is your solution?” You are not allowed to be unsure – it’s either YES or NO. There is zero training, zero integration process, zero learning curve – your onboarding process it to keep nudging the people next to you to ask them how to do/where to find something. You are expected to know everything within your first couple of weeks/months. Do not expect Directors to offer any form of direction – you need to come up with your own solution to producing/marketing mediocre conferences with no budget, and generating downloads with no proper content. Be prepared to keep extracting random pages from your event brochures and positioning that as “content” in order to get the measly download. Or bait-and-switch the prospect with a “sample” report or an 8-year outdated piece from their lousy IQ portals. Which is a perfect segue into my next topic – budget.
5. Budget: Do NOT be fooled by their mock marketing project that they present you on the interview. Let me guess – you were given a $20k budget to allocate and spend as you please… What they fail to mention is that 95% of that goes to internal BS and fees! It’s like the lemonade stand on the Verizon commercial – your marketing budget will go to “poison control fees” and “standing-on-my-lawn fees”. Email broadcast fees? Internal email costs? Brochure edit fees? Website recharge fees? Portal fees? - We even have to pay our UK office fees for any assistance that they provide us! So you’ll ultimately have scraps to spend to on your conference over the course of 12-16 weeks.
6. LinkedIn: Since there is no budget to properly produce/market an event – be prepared to STALK and HARASS and SPAM random LinkedIn group owners under the guise of formulating a “media partnership” with them. Once you get assigned a conference, you hit LinkedIn hard and stalk anyone and everyone that is big in the industry or connected to your speakers, begging for them to send LinkedIn Announcements to their groups. Be prepared to make 1000 new and pointless connections. You need to spend money to make money – or else you should not be in business!
