Consulting is tough. Technology implementation is tough. Working in budget-constrained environments is tough. Growing and nurturing a company across 5+ countries is tough. Harnessing the passion of your workers, while balancing that with a degree of separation from work, and providing adequate support, is tough.
All these factors made for a challenging work environment at times. Some things that I struggled with during my time at Vera were:
- Long hours: I don't think I ever worked less than 45 hours per week, and usually averaged closer to 50 hours. On stressful days/weeks/projects, I sometimes worked up to 60 hours. Sometimes this was fine, other times it was not.
- Work logging: You have to take personal responsibility for logging all your work, while ensuring that you adhere to a schedule that (usually) someone else planned, and also hitting certain billable targets to qualify for promotions/raises... This becomes easier over time, but it took me 1-2 years to get used to it, and I still struggled with it in various ways for the 5 years I was employed there. Not everyone works well this way.
- Stressful and sometimes chaotic environments (often due to the caring nature of the employees and working with nonprofit organisations who have lower budgets and less experienced project managers on their side).
- An expectation that professional development and growth will happen automatically through project work and self-learning... Not enough ebb-and-flow to allow for recovery time and digestion of learnings.
- Exciting opportunities for growth and experience, but which sometimes didn't match my experience levels or come with the support needed to execute well.
- A general theme of "those who shout the loudest are heard first". If you're head-strong and good at advocating for yourself, you will thrive at Vera. Those who were not, often struggled. I didn't struggle with this, but it really frustrated me and broke my heart to witness people who did (usually in the CPT or Mumbai offices).