Westat reviews

The training was less than adequate for the work you were expected to do. The field managers need to be more adequately trained. My field manager was dismissive, almost to the point of being rude. She was also the trainer for my California training and definitely showed that she had either not ever been a teacher or never learned fundamental skills in how to do a training for adults. She jumped from topic to topic, had problems with her own equipment and then raced through lessons to make up for lost time. She didn't seem to care whether someone understood what she was presenting and caused so much stress that I became physically ill. If it weren't for other supervisors who showed some empathy when I was so frustrated, I probably would have quit. Then as the field manager for our area, she was even worse. I realize she has a job to do and a large territory to cover, but she gave the word "bureaucrat" an even more distasteful meaning. She seemed to go about her job trying to pinch pennies and causing more problems than what was needed. Assigning people to a team who live 1 1/2 -3 hours from you only caused me to have to do not only my job, but the assistants' jobs also. Not understanding the landscape of Upstate NY and the winter weather also caused problems. You cannot expect someone who lives in a snow belt to drive in a snow storm to get to a school by 6:P30-7:30 AM from your home which is usually and hour or more away. She made you feel as though you were trying to steal from the government when you expected to stay in a hotel the day before an assessment. The roads through the Adirondack area are winding, and can be dangerous in the Summer because of the wildlife, in the winter they can be deadly. The materials given to learn you job were horrible. The manuals were written by bureaucrats who are too close to the material to see the problem. They are not straight forward, they don't even have an index at the back to be able to look for key words or terms to find where in the manual you might find the answers. Some common sense training on who to do important forms like time sheets, TERS, and FEFs were never given. Disjointed training with your team members caused a lot of problems. My team were sent to training near where they lived so that I never got to meet my team before we showed up at the hotel the night before the first assessment.

There is a lot of downtime between projects. However, I'm sure much of this cannot be helped. This is not a place where there is much room for growth for lower level staff/people without graduate degrees. There are people working at this company who have been there for 3+ years and work two jobs because the pay is quite low, even for the area. I spoke to my supervisor over the phone one time and one time only, in which she told me that I could contact her should I ever need anything. I took her up on her offer only to be met with no response or a 2 week response time to my emails most of the time. Going from being an intern - who worked 40 hours a week and did the same amount of work as some of the full-time workers in the office - to having my status changed to full-time and salaried, moved at a glacial pace. It's evident that the company does not value lower level staff as they expect people to put their lives on hold while they wait on months of "approval" from corporate to get paid more for doing the same work that some full time employees do.