Pros
Working as a production technician at Slade Health definitely has some pros, it ultimately depends on what you though. * The other production techs are mostly great people. You will definitely make some great friends amongst your peers working here. * The work itself can be quite fulfilling, knowing that you are helping people (generally who are sick or having some kind of medical procedures) who need the products you are involved in getting out to them. * The work is pretty varied once you are trained in every area (decontamination of items, picking of items, compounding, assisting the compounder and finally sealing/packaging/quality checking items). * If you are young this is a great job for resume building. It gives you many skills such as attention to detail, safety focus, a foot in the door to the pharmaceutical industry, teamwork. * If you just want a job where as soon as you walk out the door you can switch off * There are many different teams you can join with different hours to suit your lifestyle. For example you can work 6am-2pm, 830am-430pm or 2pm to 10pm. Getting the timeslot you want will depend on the business needs, but you can switch teams if you desire and there is room to accommodate you. * The pay is decent, especially for young people. If you can endure and get up to a band 5, the pay can get over $40 an hour. But you will start closer to $30 and it takes years to go up in bands.
Cons
For me personally, the cons make Slade Health a company that I would not want to work at long term. * The Management is abysmal. The major issue as far as I saw it, was almost everyone who is in a supervisor or management position, was once a Production Technician. This naturally gives someone a good insight into the business, but unfortunately it does absolutely nothing to make these people capable managers. The other issue with this is it has created a massive boys club. Most of the managers are men, and most promotions are doled out for the wrong reasons. Do not expect any kind of proper personal development from managers. The best you will get is a yearly or bi-yearly catchup where they parrot off statistics that are generated from the system Production Techs use. In these catchups they will rattle off how competent you are at each of the different Production Technician tasks, and this is based on a non-transparent system where basically you need to complete things at a certain pace to get certain levels of competency. The big problem here is you have no idea what these times are, and also you do not know if your peers are following the rules so to speak (hint, they don't, everyone tries to game the system so they can rank higher). If you do not hit certain targets in this system, you can miss out on banding increases which impacts you ability to earn more money. To make this even worse, you cannot go up a band at any time, it only happens once or twice a year. If you start working for Slade after a banding period has commenced, you will be ineligible the first time a review comes up because you have not been working for long enough. So imagine you work 5 months, and have to wait 1 year to go up a band when another colleague may only have to wait 6 months just because of their start date. * People running projects have no idea what they are doing. Things are rolled out with little to zero testing, then there is a mad scramble to try and fix things post implementation that could have been ironed out beforehand. * A big point of frustration amongst techs is just what "Supervisors" do. Because I can tell you now, they do not do any supervising. They spend most of their time in the office doing who knows what. Now I don't entirely blame the supervisors for this, as I am sure upper management have them doing things that the Techs do not see, but in my eyes if a supervisor is never visible then that is a problem. * They will look for any reason to prevent you going up a band. The worst thing they do is not give you any kind of feedback throughout the months, then you get to your review and something that you could have fixed with feedback, ends up denying you a band increase then your pay stagnates until the next review in 6 months. * If you are reading this Slade Management, change the banding system to reward your good staff. If someone is consistently working at a band 4 level, but they do not meet the tenure requirements for this band, that should not be a reason to hold them back. Making someone take years to get paid what they are deserving of is not how you keep good people. * Sick leave is out of control at Slade Health. There are many reasons for this, the main ones being that the job comes with a high risk of injury and Slades love of denying annual leave requests (most often due to not having enough staff). * Slade Health has free physios on site, why is this in the cons section you ask? Well the reason the physios are there is to try and prevent workers compensation claims. As I mentioned above, there is a very high likelihood you will get injured being a production technician. The biggest problem is training. It takes an extremely long time to train a production technician into every role available to them. When you start you may learn Decontamination (basically cleaning items) and Picking (gathering items from a list and putting them in a tub) then you will be stuck doing these two tasks for probably months. If you know every job in 2 years you are extremely lucky. But from my observations you will likely learn one clean room job (assisting or compounding) and not learn the other for a very long time. This leads to extreme repetition which leads to RSI type injuries. Nearly everyone there has some kind of injury once they work there for a while. My advice is if you do take this job, listen to your body and don't feel bad if you need to restrict your duties on doctors order. * The attrition rate is extremely high due to the reasons I have stated. I feel if Slade rewarded Techs more, by increasing pay when they deserve it and training people faster, this rate would drop. * If you love getting pats on the back, or really any kind of recognition for hard work, do not expect that here. The only kind of thanks you ever get is through a nomination system which relies on your peers nominating you for something and then a manager approving it for an award. The vast majority of these nominations get rejected for awards. Which I guess is probably due to some kind of bell curve, but let me tell you, if you have been working as hard as you can for months and get no award at all despite nominations, then see someone else get a reward for an absolutely ridiculous reason, you will get frustrated. * If you want career progression, and you don't have some kind of medical qualifications like in pharmacy, or science, forget about it. Supervisor roles hardly ever come up (and as mentioned they go to favourites) and training roles, whilst a step up, don't pay much more than tech and you still need to do tech work at least for a while. Those are your only real progression options without qualifications.