Upper Management is a Mess! Run Don't Walk Away!
Pros
Although I was severely underpaid for the amount of roles I had a the same time, I started as a clinician and made my way through being a mentor, tester, consultant, site manager and an Associate Director - so a lot of opportunity to grow (although this was because of super high turnover) so if your center has a ton of turnover that can benefit you in that there are openings for higher roles Mentoring and feedback is really dependent on center, some have amazing culture where everyone excels as a clinician and others turn into complete dumpster fires that have to have multiple people come in to rescue because there is no staff to do any of the jobs they have They constantly have leadership training as a way to find people who will be motivated to be thrown into a management role that they may or may not be prepared for (quick advancement is used to keep salary low since you don't actually have prior experience to justify earning more) I have to say that this job prepared me for any high stress situation even more than a lifeguard did since I am used to doing the jobs of 2-4 full time people by myself Programs really do work for the students and the only reason I stayed for over 5 years was because of the relationships I build with my students and their families If you are interested in working in early intervention, speech, ot etc and are in college this is a great place for a summer job to get lots of exposure to students of all backgrounds and diagnoses (I LOVED working here until I became full time year round and saw how much the offices fall apart with the lack of students during the school year and half the staff ends up fired) Some truly amazing people work here and I am glad I got the chance to get to know them. In five years and 3 different centers, I can say that I know 2 people that are still employed there and it is only because they are in an area that they truly excel at, everyone else moved on.
Cons
There is constant staff turn over at every level, partly because when the summer influx dies down all of the new staff gets laid off because there are no more students - staff is kept at part-time year round so that no benefits need to be offered and often hours will be distributed so that one all the full time people get their minimum 30 hours they would give out a few hours to each part time person to keep them from not being on the schedule and walking out Huge disconnect between upper management (especially the CEO) and the hourly staff - as a clinician and even a consultant you are given almost NO information about anything, good example being the most recent amount of paycuts that were issued with no warning Sales is always being spoken about as being second to the true purpose of teaching the children - however all management ever pushes is sales, weekly competitions to get as many hours signed as you can are posted all over the internal company site, with challenges for each center to sign as many students as possible Sales technique was to train in the language they want you to use during sales calls, then follow up with every person until they either explicitly ask you not to contact them anymore or you see they stop opening your emails - there was never any development in how to improve sales technique other than "If they didn't sign up, it was because you didn't make them believe it was worth it" as if $12,000+ was just something every family had to throw around and it was your fault they cant find it lying around somewhere Management is extremely consistent - I made sure to get everything in writing because I got tired of being told to do things and then chastised the following week for doing them the way they were asked and not being able to read minds The Kool-aid here is STRONG, and even though I do believe these programs worked for the students I worked with, its almost the unofficial policy to be miserable and over worked because it is "for the students", During annual reviews (of which in 5 years they only offered an annual raise once and it was 50 cents) you were treated as money grubbing and not committed to the cause if you asked for compensation to match the amount of work you were doing. It would actually remove people from consideration from promotions if they asked for raises because that showed they would probably leave for another job for the money so we would just stop training them and move on to someone who "cared more about the students" then to ask for enough money to pay their rent