International opportunities for proactive & ambitious sales people - Managing Director Meltwater Employee Review

The balance between work and personal life is generally pretty bad. In order to progress you may have to move abroad which can of course be a great thing, but also a challenge if you have a family or you are in a serious relationship. The support with transferring abroad is limited, at least at the time I had to do everything on my own. The quick promotion scheme based on one's sales performance alone has produced a immature middle management that lack the experience and training required to cope with their responsibilities. The senior management rarely has the time to mentor their subordinates and the training programs are few and far between. The much appraised MBA training for MDs for instance was once organised for certain regions only due to cash flow issues. I personally never had the opportunity to take part even though I had the MD role in several different offices. This made me feel unequal with my colleagues. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the communication and change management is terrible and this I know to be a big issue still. A company growing as fast as Meltwater should pay more attention to how they manage these rather massive organisational changes it has to go through quite frequently. It is risky business to put pressure on people to leave the company just because they have to implement a change quickly and they haven't managed to find a suitable role for everybody. Communication in these situations has been notoriously poor and left many committed people bitter. The group HR is still in its early days and has never been much prioritized by the senior management. There is no local support and the HR staff in general has no relevant education (they're all former sales consultants etc.) nor the local expertise required to tackle tricky situations such as maternity leaves, transfers or dismissals.