Toxic, Abusive Call Center Environment - Student Support Advisor Chamberlain University Employee Review

Management will try to sell you on this position as helping students with financial and academic issues, but this is really a call center environment where everything is timed and micromanaged. It is no different than working at a call center for your cable or cell phone company. Putting notes in the computer, taking a break, or using the restroom counts against you as part of your "not ready" time for taking calls. If this sounds like a sweatshop environment, it is. The negative reviews on here are all accurate. The training gives you a fraction of what you need to know for the job. Everything you do at Chamberlain is micromanaged. Quality Assurance monitors the calls and then picks one every two or three weeks for evaluation, and they always find something wrong with the call. They have an ever-growing list of items you need to cover in every call with a student and the exact phrasing you need to use, even if this was covered with the student previously. Expect to talk to a lot of angry students in this job. QA also expects "one call resolution," so shame on you if you forget to cover a point in their laundry list of items. The managers will never help out if the phones get busy. One of the other reviewers is right in saying that managers seem to do nothing but run reports all day and find ways to yell at the employees. Division managers treat the employees like school children and will write up anyone who has a cell phone on their desk or who wasn't "attentive enough" at a meeting (the idea of making meetings more interesting never seems to cross the minds of management at Chamberlain). The computer systems at Chamberlain are horrible. Many are outdated, and there are way too many programs to juggle overall. One or several systems will go down at least once a week. And once they do, you will have the joy of calling an outsourced Help Desk in the Philippines where they barely understand the systems you are using. The overall environment at Chamberlain is negative. Managers are constantly thinking of ways to criticize the employees, and praise rarely is given. Very few employees have been working there longer than five years. If you have any criticisms of procedures, you'd better keep them to yourself, because they have a "cult of positivity" at Chamberlain which has infected so many corporate environments now. They constantly talk about where you are on the "mood elevator", and you'd better fake that you're doing ok or else risk getting tagged as a "negative" person. The truth is that most people there are feeling burned out a majority of the time. Management will also fire people on a moment's notice, and a lot of times, they will fire someone based strictly on what another backstabbing colleague has said. The ideal Chamberlain employee for management seems to be a twentysomething with retail experience who doesn't know that things could be run much better. The starting salary is decent, but annual raises are typically in the 2% to 3% range. Advancing or even just changing departments is very difficult because of company bureaucracy and often seems to be based on favoritism. This is a major factor for why most colleagues don't stay with the company. Keep in mind that Chamberlain's parent company is Adtalem, which used to be called DeVry Education Group. They changed their name recently because of their bad reputation. A big reason for Adtalem/DeVry's bad reputation is the $100 million settlement they were forced to pay for deceptive advertising. Think twice before coming to work here. The place is a revolving door for a reason. Unless you enjoy working in a call center which pretends to be a school, a place where the management is constantly micromanaging and criticizing the employees, you can do better elsewhere. This is a for-profit school, and both you and the students are treated only as numbers. You are only as good as your last phone adherence report and QA evaluation.