Researcher - BD Center of Excellence Specialist At EY Wikistrat Employee Review

4.0
29 Dec 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Great platform for networking, connecting, and working with like-minded professionals across a variety of métiers and in multiplicity of roles - Superb way to enhance one's personal knowledge capacity and stay up to date with revolving and evolving ideas and theories if are actively engaged in the company's unique method of 'collaborative competition' - Opportunities to collaborate with senior professionals - Is a great open forum for debate to work through real-time, ongoing situations in international relations and geopolitics

Cons

- Compensation not equitable to the amount of time one commits to doing the work, even if it is done on a part-time, casual basis as the platform allows one to - Sometimes one's voice can get lost among all the talented professionals contributing to what is, for all intensive purposes, a private-sector open-source intelligence analytical space - Because of the unique way that the platform engages its analysts by their accrual of 'points', sometimes the discussions can devolve from substantiated debate to trivial point-making, which in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. But when more time is spent doing this simply to accrue personal points or praise points, this can detract from the overall point of one contributing to the organization, which is to ultimately provide innovative, extremely well-thought out and sourced deliverables to clients.

Explore other reviews about Wikistrat

5.0
27 Dec 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great community of analysts. Good networking opportunities

Cons

No pay. Large community makes it difficult to get contributions noticed

2.0
27 Sept 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Very interesting platform and project dynamics. This Virtual Organization relies heavily on self-regulation instead of constant supervision. Huge group of interesting perspectives and background contributing on a variety of projects. Pay is based on performance and was regular until suddenly dropping. Great opportunity to network and interface with other people who are interested in the field both professional and some who might better be qualified as hobbyists.

Cons

Ideas of hobbyists and professionals are largely held on equal footing which seems to lead to a lot of burnout where experts get tired of debunking wild ideas. Similarly bad is that some projects ran by a few members are heavily biased towards their own preconceptions of the topic at hand. Pay suddenly dropped despite increased projects, rumor has it that most of them aren't actually for a specific client but to be used for pitching potential clients. Full time staff are a total mess, I've been contacted a few times to schedule a meeting but then it's forgotten about and follow up emails are ignored. Similarly, I started randomly getting the equivalent of "professional spam" from their HR and project leaders about paying projects that don't pay or recommending random fellowships and positions of which Wikistrat isn't actually involved in the recruitment process. More and more project "scenarios" seem to be derived mostly from random hypotheticals not based on data or an individual's professional experience. The "internal wiki" is largely defunct nor does the firm have any interest in compensating analysts for contributing to it.

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