Avantages
- Working on life-changing drugs can be very rewarding. - Some are trying to start a new culture at PPD. It all looks good on paper. - Co-workers can be some amazing people. - PTO is pretty good but company has lowered the cap on what you can roll over each year. Difficult if you like to take vacation early in the year. - Benefits are OK but company is passing more costs on to employees. - 401k options have investment improved. However the provider's website is awful, often fails to make updates (like contribution amounts), and they now charge employees a quarterly fee. - Starting salaries can be good but annual increases are abysmal. Compression is a big issue. You will be much better off to leave and come back at a much higher rate. - Training can be good in some parts of the company. Your department and manager will dictate your experience. - Majority of workforce are women. Although none of the executive leadership. - The moments you can focus on your actual work are great. - If you enjoy corporate politics, you have found paradise at PPD.
Inconvénients
- Insane workloads and deadlines. - Company supports work from home however your opportunity to do so may be dictated by your supervisor's antiquated view that you can only be effective if you are in the office from 8am-5pm like they are. - Company has no loyalty to their employees who helped build and lead PPD to success. - Company has no name recognition outside of the headquarters in Wilmington, NC. Surprising how few know the PPD name. - Turf wars and reorganizations are continuous and many employees get caught up in the crossfire and are let go in the process. - You will hear the One PPD mantra but see the above info on turf wars for what the reality of the situation is. - PPD has almost zero strategic planning between groups. Company is very tactical but no strategic thought or alignment. - The annual budget process is the most broken thing I have seen across a 20+ year corporate career. There is no strategic vision or alignment. Everything is in it's own silo. - Your experience at PPD will vary greatly depending on your manager and the group you work in. This includes work-life balance, perks, opportunity for advancement, compensation, and co-workers. - PPD "cuts costs" by making employees self-service everything. This way the expenses are not as apparent on their P&Ls but the weight and work falls to employees, making them less productive as a whole. More short-sighted thinking. - Over the last 3-5 years PPD has shifted more of the percentage of their health care costs to employees by paying less of a percentage. Mobile phone reimbursements were reduced from $100 per month to $70 per month. -PPD also instituted a fee for your spouse to use PPD benefits. This was done with minimal communication and they automatically started charging all employees the fee unless they worked with finance for a waiver. One email went out to employees during Thanksgiving holidays as a notice. - PPD used the recession as an opportunity to cut annual merit increases and still have a baseline of less than 2% or less for most employees. - PPD essentially has a class system where employees in sales functions are treated much better and without the restrictions that others across the company have to endure. - If you are in a role like IT, HR, etc... and they can't find a way to outsource your job, you get to use antiquated systems and endure abuse from co-workers in the more prestigious parts of PPD. You will be asked to do more, as the company grows, but have your operating budget reduced. In every way you will be treated as a necessary evil until they can find a way to do without you. - Due to lack of strategic and long range planning, company is very "penny wise and pound foolish" in their decision making. - New HR leadership looked to have potential but is falling for trendy gimmicks such as agile workspaces and special interest groups instead of fixing real problems and building a better PPD. - HR makes a lot of noise recently about career advancement but doesn't actually do anything effectively but talk. Leadership from managers on up still have antiquated views and are not supportive of losing their team members to other opportunities without resentment. Often because it's questionable if the team losing the person will be able to replace the person moving on. - Annual performance evaluations (which supposedly dictate your merit raise) is a joke. Awful system. Awful criteria. Awful results. Just demotivates employees. PPD has been told this for years and still rolls out the same old broken ideas with new packaging. - 401k match maxes out at 50% of what you put in and only up to 4% (so 2% total.) - Company does not believe in technology investments. Recently realized information security was "a thing" and is now going overboard making it more difficult for employees to do their job. You have to login approximately 5 times to different Microsoft applications each day once you start up your laptop (not kidding.) If there was ever an example of what life is like at PPD, this would be a great symbol.