- Tend to be stuck to projects you've been assigned to, without regard for career development needs. Very difficult to move around especially with lobbying in place by project managers and directors to stop you.
- Management and HR have not at all been pro-active about employee career development for a very long time, only introduced a superficial career framework in the last few months.
- Turnover rate of employees is relatively high – 1-2 people leaving a week throughout the year.
- Far too many projects being approved without the required internal resource, staff working well beyond contracted hours is an unwritten requirement and assumption from senior management.
- Generally difficult to be promoted unless you are lucky with your line manager or are a familiar face. If you are a high performing but less experienced employee, it will be much easier to look elsewhere on the job market than work towards a promotion in Ceres if you desire more responsibility.
- Many experienced employees have also been in the company for many years and have also found it challenging to get promoted until very recently. Often where people are promoted, they do not follow the company’s formal role criteria.
- Buzzwords and flowery presentations tend to be valued more than actual quality of technical work by management - completely antithetical to expected ethos of an engineering company. Many mistakes/delays in projects have come from working too quickly, and not 'getting it right first time'.
- Many senior staff and managers are incentivized to micromanage lower ranked staff even if they have no formal management responsibility. This is easily confused with 'leadership ability' and is actually detrimental to other people's career progression if their desire is to work more independently and lead their own activities.
- very poor counter offer if an employee resigns - not at all competitive with market average for a given level of expertise.
