Pros
This is a decent job for people with education backgrounds who are tired of low pay. The money and benefits are definitely competetive--20 days PTO/10 sick days, and health insurance good enough for my family. They also do 401k matching up to $10k. I appreciate that they're allowing us to WFH permanently post-Covid. The organization is quite siloed, so I interact with upper management quite little and have no idea how other departments operate, but mine feels laid back and full of people I genuinely like.
Cons
I deeply distrust all of upper management, to be quite honest. It seems as if CB does mass layoffs every 7-10 years when they decide that the current iterations of their tests are no longer profitable. This time around, they fired 10% of the staff--40% in my department. I was pretty creeped out by the way management has handled this layoff--lots of corporate speak, the phrase "There will always be barbarians at the gates of Rome" was thrown out--and it made me seriously rethink my plan to stay at the organization long term. In the wake of the layoff, CB has rushed to churn out a totally new set of products at the expense of quality, not to mention employee morale and work-life balance. It all feels very rushed and ill-conceived. The higher ups get all misty eyed when they talk about how much our organization helps students, and I'm just not buying it. Just look at all the ways the SAT nickels and dimes students, or the fact that they sell their data to colleges who solicit applications from students who have no chance of getting in, just to keep their admissions numbers low. The resumes of the leadership team read like a roll call of educational programs that are iffy at best, actively harmful at worst--Common Core, Teach for America, test prep companies, etc. I'm obviously implicated too, because I choose to stay, but it's just disconcerting to hear the dissonance between what CB does and what CB thinks it does. I work here because I need a job and am qualified for this work, but I do not believe in our mission for one second. I might have before, but this recent layoff opened my eyes to the fact that this is, bottom line, a business. The SAT and AP are money makers, and it's the money, not the best interests of the students or the staff, that they will guard at all costs.
