Frustrating engineering environment with poor leadership and pay - Anonymous employee ClearCourse Employee Review

There are some genuinely talented and dedicated colleagues across the business who care deeply about customers and support one another. I learned a great deal during my 10+ years with EKM and had opportunities to develop my skills, lead a fantastic team and build strong relationships with customers.

In my experience, the culture changed significantly over time following acquisitions and organisational restructuring - following the buyout to ClearCourse. Communication became increasingly top-down, with frequent changes to priorities, targets and commission structures. Employee wellbeing often felt secondary to commercial objectives. During periods of organisational change, I found consultation and communication lacking, and decisions sometimes appeared to have been made before employee feedback had been fully considered. Returning from a period of ill health was particularly challenging, as I did not feel adequately supported despite occupational health recommendations. Recognition for teams delivering excellent customer outcomes felt inconsistent, while pressure and uncertainty continued to increase. Long-serving employees may find that loyalty is not always reflected in how they are treated during periods of change. Pay and rewards were not adequate, given the specific skillsets required. Teams were promised benchmarking to bring pay in line but it never materialised and they were made redundant. It felt wrong that employees in Expert roles were still on minimum wage with 5yrs + service!!

To preface this: your experience will vary greatly depending on what team/company within the group you are hired for. This is applicable to a business with a much smaller team within the group - A lot of trust in choosing technologies - Product is great and exciting to work on

- Decision making is always geared towards short-term monetary goals, and priorities change completely every quarter (if not sooner sometimes) - Group is sales-focused, which has a major knock-on effect on sub-company priorities. I suspect the majority of good reviews will be from sales, SLT, or mid-level management roles - Little to no recognition for engineering teams - Redundancies happen often, even when the business is performing well - Years-long hiring freeze for smaller teams - Large AI push from senior leadership, with questions being asked if employees refuse to utilize it - Non-technical management make final technical decisions (architecture, frameworks, UI design, etc) without consulting technical teams - Non-technical management promise product features and deadlines without consulting technical teams - Management do not recognise technical debt and platform maintenance as a task that needs time allocated - Pay reviews are irregular, and promises of pay rises go unfulfilled for a long time (over a year in my case) - Product requirements often change mid-project - Product requirements are always added to mid-project - Poor management decisions have caused some of the best talent to leave of their own accord. Years ago this happened when group attempted to merge two of our largest companies/products, and completely mismanaged the project - To my knowledge, a junior developer has never been hired in my team or any teams that I know of. I don't believe this company knows what Junior developers are