I would strongly advise against any creative professional working with Get Licensed, whether as a full-time employee, a contractor, or an organisation hired to audit, review or contribute to its content marketing strategy.
Get Licensed suffers from a mixture of management styles that, on one hand, are inspiring and ideas-driven, almost romanticising the possibilities that creativity offers; versus a propensity for severe micromanagement and clockwatching over said creatives.
Altogether, this means the company demonstrates a level of competence when managing creative professionals that falls far short of amateurish - often veering into outright mistrust.
Get Licensed operates under the motto "Do The Right Thing". I invite the reader to keep this mantra in mind as I tabulate my experiences during what turned into a recklessly short stint with the business, in a position I was assured was permanent, and had accepted the job offer under such understanding.
When interviewing for the position at Get Licensed, I was informed that my role would largely involve producing new articles and whitepapers, while also spending some time reviewing and amending a wealth of old blog content contributed by a freelancer predecessor.
Instead, what most of my job entailed was writing copy, not content, for various sporadically necessary landing pages for the business, while fitting in my original job commitments between juggling a heavy workload of landing page copy, and explaining to micromanagers in draining daily meetings why said landing pages couldn't simply be spirited out of the ether with the instantaneousness they insisted on.
Throughout, the business had no interest in giving me the time to actually do the things I had been originally hired to do, which felt frustrating and disingenuous.
Get Licensed seems genuinely bewildered that making things takes time, that 30,000 words of written content cannot be edited in two hours, etc.
There are daily meetings to discuss what everyone's doing, which feel organised at first, but soon devolve into either justifying what you're doing and why it takes actual time to produce, or waiting for whatever management has read on LinkedIn, a Gary Vee tweet or conjured from ponderous lounging in the conservatory to shoehorn into the conversation. One quickly learns to nodding-dog one's way through any and all of the above just to get through the meeting and actually get on with your day's work.
Get Licensed is a textbook example of The Planning Fallacy - the phenomenon in which even the most seasoned professionals can't help but mistake how long a given project will take. Rather than anticipate this in any way, management insists we all stuff our calendars full every Monday, and then when something inevitably crops up on Wednesday we have to reshuffle everything to accommodate it and see everything get delayed.
Micromanagement obsesses over calendar control and chronicling how long everything takes, and constantly revises which systems and metrics are used to this effect because nothing to this end ever actually works or solves any problems.
Projects as set out are also somewhat imprecise. Training is very meticulous when you first enter the business, and then sort of abruptly stops and you just have to feel your way out through bespoke systems and cluttered content management systems. I was later criticised for not correctly formatting certain elements of the landing pages I kept having to write for some reason, and then given a list of instructions on said formatting long after having said instructions would have proven useful.
This sort of thing is quite commonplace due to a paradoxical blend of lackadaisical and overbearing management styles, meaning things slip through the cracks and are incorrectly instructed and trained, while also being needlessly hauled over the coals and questioned over minutiae concurrently. It's a pretty mentally draining process.
Luckily, if you can get past this, you largely get left alone to do your work, as the team is broadly disinterested in social niceties and all webchat conversations are transactional.
Or critical. Very often critical.
When raising concerns that my job was effectively the kind of thing most competent businesses hand to a full content team of at least three people instead of just one writer, and that management was veering towards a toxic level of interference and mistrust of my capabilities, these considerations were either swept under the rug, gaslit away in convivial conversation, or - in the end - used as an excuse to terminate my position without forewarning.
I am the sole provider for a household including disabled individuals, and was made redundant and immediately, unapologetically locked out of the business out of the blue. "Do The Right Thing".
Unfeelingly, Get Licensed began campaigning for me to send them back the laptop they'd originally given me two weeks late, and has since changed the credit of all the work I produced at the company to the name of another individual - whose grammar is poor, misuse of American English on a British website is rife, and article structure demonstrates exactly what the business had hired me to remedy in order to trend in web searches. "Do The Right Thing".
It feels almost comically pointless to remark on how stealing and misappropriating credit for a creative's work is the height of insult, to say nothing of terminating them under the veil of redundancy in order to follow advice they themselves gave the business to prevent its content marketing strategy from becoming untenable. Management also claimed I was out of my probationary period when I demonstrably wasn't, meaning either I was being gaslit or they cannot read calendars. At the time of writing, I'm unsure which of these variables is worse.
"Do The Right Thing".
If I'm to leave a final warning to creatives against working with this business, it's this. After hiring me, Get Licensed welcomed a talented video creative onboard, who unfortunately contracted the coronavirus, yet heroically opted to continue providing work for the company to the best of their ability.
During a morning meeting, management sneeringly remarked behind this individual's back that the fact that someone who had *contracted Covid-19* hadn't called in sick that very morning to say if they'd be logging in to work or not was showing a 'bad work ethic' and was 'being unprofessional'.
This is emblematic of the nature of the company's true outlook. Any company who is able to receive any work from any sick individual is extremely lucky, and should encourage that individual seek appropriate self-care instead of working. Quite how the situation I have instead described constitutes "Doing The Right Thing" is quite beyond my understanding of emotional intelligence, or indeed intelligence in general.
Get Licensed locked me out of company systems so fast that I never received my final payslip from the company ahead of the funds landing in my bank account. They never thought to send that payslip to me via other means, making it financially impossible to plan ahead. This is a breach of UK employee rights, and has been reported as such.
I hopefully don't have to explain why breaching UK employee rights is not "Doing The Right Thing".
