Charles Schwab Employee Review

Former Employee – worked at Charles Schwab full-time for less than a year

Pros – Great 9-5ish scheduling and scheduled breaks throughout the day. Friendly people that are always willing to help you as you start out in your role. Flexibility to move laterally if you feel another area of service may work better for your skills and experience.

Cons – Not much upward mobility at all. Despite the opportunity to grow laterally within the company there are not a lot of opportunities to move up into management or "senior positions". Even then, the largest incentive to move into management is removing yourself from the customer service and widgets you are gauged on. Pay is mediocre and the everyday workload is incredibly monotonous. The training is not consistent with real world applications and typically most of what you learn is from first hand experience of what not to do after you do it. Unorganized policies and processes as well as where and how to find them. Mid level management is more of a "here ya go boy" than operational position. When guidance is needed from mid level management a fair amount of self discovery will provide you more assistance.

Advice to Senior Management – Update training for new hires and on going training after hiring. Create more developmental training to expand people's skills versus constant cheerleading sessions on why we do what we do and our need to focus on what we've been focusing on since day one. Challenge mid level management to know their craft. When their staff constantly knows more of what to do than the manager, there's a larger issue on who gets promoted and why and tends to lead to rapid turnover. One of the largest issues I saw while there is that the employee holds no real power. In customer service, allegedly, the customer is always right. In this role the employee needs to know the policies, have easy access to those policies, and have the power to enforce those on the customer when needed. Being as the customer is the advisor it does make it challenging but the mindset of, when they say jump, we say how high, will ultimately burn the advisor, the company, and possibly the end client.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend