I was brought on board for a freelance content migration (content developer) contract that was supposed to be full-time for six months. The pay wasn't ideal but six months of guaranteed full-time work was too good a deal to pass up. On the very first day, I instantly regretted my decision.
When brought in for training, two of the first things they told us were: they overhired for the amount of work they have and there will be downtime. My vision of full-time employment for six months quickly vanished. The work was easy, too easy for a skilled content developer. The first project, that was slated to take six weeks, was completed in two-and-a-half weeks. This is due to the ease of the work and the fact that there were twice as many people working on it as the task required. The leads were ecstatic and praised us for completing the project so quickly - this probably made them look good to their bosses.
Speed and efficiency are great. Unfortunately, we all worked ourselves out of a job as they didn't have the next project ready to go, so we had a week of downtime. During that week, we received an email stating that they did not have the workload to keep all of us busy and asked for volunteers to terminate their contract. They said they only needed 5-8 people as opposed to the 20 they hired. If they didn't get enough volunteers, they would terminate based off of performance. Even those who made the cut wouldn't have the 40 hour weeks that drew us to the job in the first place. I flipped them the bird (or at least flipped off my computer screen) and hit the pavement. Now I need to figure out what to do with the next six months.
That's the short of my experience with Pearson. What started out as six months of full-time work dissolved into three weeks of part-time work. I'd laugh at the absurdity if I wasn't on the receiving end of this scam.
