Reasearch Associate - Anonymous employee Center For The Study Services Employee Review

You'll learn a lot on the job. Management is very supportive, makes sure you learn and will give you real responsibility over time. If you do your job you will be rewarded for it, raises are excellent. Even if senior staff is going nowhere they find ways to allow growth in your job and promotions.

Parts of job can be a bit tedious. Certain times of year become really busy. In some ways like any 9 to 5 job in that sense.

Good benefits: cheap healthcare, great 403b contribution, 3 weeks+ PTO Very smart and dedicated colleagues. Multiple opportunities to interact outside of work. Flat organization with lots of responsibility for junior employees. Decent yearly raises. Great downtown location. Healthy business financials mean your job is pretty much secure. Not required to stay late and management will work with you to reallocate work, but if you care about your clients/projects and meeting deadlines, you will have quite a few late nights.

Only speaking of the healthcare research side (note there is also a magazine side with different working conditions): Low starting salaries, no opportunity to move up (maybe in 10 years you will get to be a senior associate), no real opportunities for professional development without promising to stay employed there for a long length of time, lots of boring QA (unavoidable to protect our reputation) and repetitive, non-inspiring contracts. Literally you'll be working on 5 projects featuring a slight variation of the same survey for different clients. Rinse and repeat. You will not get to work on anything really innovative or useful for the outside world. It is primarily surveys created by some other entity for healthcare companies to check a regulatory box.