Pros
The free snacks, the hard 6pm finish.
Cons
Joining the ‘Sales and analytics’ programme is one of the worst career decisions you can make as a new grad. A sad, unskilled, depressing job. 1) The sales portion of the job is non existent, they need to recruit heavily for their Helpdesk customer support (which they call analytics) so sugar coat the job title with ‘Sales’. The reality is, there is little to no sales work. Even at the account manager level, your goal is merely to maintain annoying levels of ‘touch points’ with bbg clients. You feel more like a nuisance than anything else. 2) Dull, mind-numbing, with little skill development. What does it mean to work in analytics? Well, you’ll spend 6-7 hours sitting on a helpdesk, taking 3 tickets at once, pushed to complete a ticket every 30mins at max, and not leave clients hanging for more than 5mins. Every bit of your client communication is scrutinised, and you can get negative performance reviews on little things like replying to an incoming client 30 seconds late. So if you’re looking to stare at a screen repeating ‘Hello my name is X how May I help you’ 50x a day, then this is for you. Oh and even if you don’t know the answer, you’re forced to say ‘checking’ even though you have no clue what’s going on and are looking for the next poor analytics soul to send this problem to. 3) the clients have 0 respect for you. You are their dog. Think you’ll be working on complex financial analysis and analytics? Nope. You’ll be helping clients with the most stupid, minor queries such as - ‘how do I change my chart colour’ - ‘how do I change this setting - ‘I’d like to complain about my account manager’ clients hate the Bloomberg terminal but have no choice but to stick with it. The software is clunky, old, and unnecessarily complex, but client complaints are in vain. It’s your job to navigate them through confusing settings to get the simplest of tasks done. 4) everyone, I mean EVERYONE is trying to leave analytics It isn’t spoken about until someone brings it up, but you’d be surprised how many people are miserable and are looking to just leave. I’ve spoken to advanced reps who haven’t a clue where their future is going. As advanced asset specialists, they complain their skills (master in tweaking settings!) are not transferable at all to other jobs, so they’re pretty much stuck. On your first few weeks, they’ll butter you up with the Bloomberg cool-aid. Do yourself a favour and remain critical, see through the BS, and look to go into a profession where you’ll gain actual employable skills. 5) compensation is ridiculously non-transparent. (This is ironic considering how EVERY thing is transparent to everyone in the company including what time you come in, your stats, and your schedule etc) You have no clue what metrics your bonus/ rise is being based on, given there is so much that is taken into account from A) how many queries you close B) how fast you closed it C) quality control of queries D) how many times you called clients to solve their issues 6) they add bunch of useless roles and responsibilities to make you feel like you’re doing something. I still haven’t a clue what deputy team leaders do apart from pestering everyone to fill in their weekly performance highlights (yes, we have to brag about the most mundane things). 7) financial training is superficial. Since you’re mostly working with tweaking complex software settings for clients, trainings are focused on that rather than the instrument and its intricacies. You’ll learn the basics at most. 8) can’t catch a breath. You are treated like a toddler with insane levels of micromanagement. Following from 5). Bloomberg is constantly down your neck. Every second of your schedule is predetermined two weeks in advance. You need to be on queue for 85-90% of your time (but senior people have told me you should keep it at 95!). This means your toilet breaks are timed, you are constantly rushing, you have NO FLEXIBILITY. After a long 7 hours in queue, do you want a break in peace and quiet? Not possible. You’re forced into pestering clients and pushing features down their throats in your free time. There are no private spaces to ‘relax’ in either, and thanks to the ‘amazing’ open office layout you’re under the constant watchful eye of your TL. How great! Finish training early and want to go home? Nope, you're told to go ‘network’ with people. What does that even mean? 9) YOU HAVE TO WORK SOME SATURDAYS Yes, I wish I knew this, but they don’t tell you this in the application process. You know now, you’re welcome 10) IF YOU PART OF A LANGUAGE BUCKET THERE IS A ROTA TO START 1 HOUR EARLY Just another thing they don’t tell you. You’re welcome :)