Great company to start your career, but compensation is poor.
Pros
-Good work/life balance. -Good benefits. -An enormous amount to learn. -PPD invests in their employees' growth. Lots of hiring happens internally for group leader positions, etc. If you can get into management early on, you will build a ton of excellent experience that you can take with you anywhere in GMP land. -Lots of knowledgeable and talented coworkers and subject matter experts with a genuine interest to help you learn along the way. -Very generous employee referral program.
Cons
-Poor compensation. Working at PPD feels like an internship that trains you for your real job that pays you a real salary. Compensation is significantly lower (typically 20-30%) compared to other biotech companies in the surrounding area. Hard to recommend based on this alone (as if feels highly exploitative), unless you need to get your start in GMP. -And because of the poor compensation, employee retention is low. In the past year, 11 people have left in my group alone for greener ($$) pastures. -Management at times can be chaotic. For example in the past year alone the way work was divided among groups was majorly restructured 2 times, causing unnecessary delays and many project false starts, which led to frustration. -Management can differ a lot between groups (your mileage may vary). Some groups expect you to be able to schedule your own time, which is generally the expectation in a professional work environment. Other group management has unbearable micromanagement practices. Stability team, for example, has daily interrogation meetings that quiz you on what you did the day prior and what you will be doing that day. It's comically unnecessary for people that are self-starters, but that's just the way the cookie crumbles. -Job responsibilities can be a double edge sword. On the one hand, having to balance GMP data review, managing projects, being in the lab, and completing 5S tasks is a monumental task and unrealistic burden. In fact, the company had dissolved their data review department a few years ago, only to come full circle and start hiring for data review positions again. However, on the other hand, the combination of all of those job responsibilities makes you an attractive candidate for other companies for positions advertised with less job responsibilities, as you develop a wide range of excellent experience and hence, employ-ability. -Promotions can be erratic and slow coming (case by case basis). For example, PPD advertises the Associate Research Scientist position has someone with 6 years of "equivalent" experience. Senior Scientist is 5 years. Yet internal promotions typically occur two years from hire (and I've seen it up to 4 years after hire).
