Abysmal pay. Joined as an Image Analyst, where the job description stipulated you needed a degree, salary was unadvertised, waited until the end of my interview to tell me it was minimum wage. Very limited opportunities for progression within Image Analysis, and team restructuring last year has only worsened this by shifting all management responsibilities to one person, reducing development opportunities for others. The team structure really makes no sense, the different “grades” of roles don’t translate to anything meaningful, and there’s probably about £500 a year between them at best. Within a role that should be considered the same “grade”, employees can be on different salaries which is exacerbated year on year with discrepancies between pay rise %. Image Analysis work is highly repetitive and demanding, yet tagging targets are constantly pushed on staff when more focus should be placed on quality of IDs and professional development. Very limited set of skills to be learned in IA, need to take advantage of any secondment opportunity that comes up to stand a chance of getting a better job in consultancy. Obsession with developing new software to streamline the process but not willing to actually invest anything into it, putting strain on in-house developers when really this should’ve been outsourced. “Hire and fire” culture in IA or, at least, “hire on a fixed term contract and then don’t renew the contract” vibe when the work is slow. Not concerned with retaining talent, happy enough to constantly cycle through early career ecologists via FTCs, investing nothing in their development, and then axing the bottom XX% when the demand for work is low. Considering the number of IA salaries suddenly saved this way, interesting that this money never seems to be reinvested back into the team.
