Apollo Education Group Employee Reviews about "leadership"

Cons

Due to mismanagement, incompetence, and running the sales side of the company like a high-pressure sales scam for most of its existence, Apollo is losing at least 15-20% of revenue and enrollment year over year every single quarter. Leadership and execs are more interested in meeting arbitrary financial targets than the satisfaction of customers and clients and will lay off whoever it takes to make that goal. CIO and IT leadership team is especially inept at realizing you can't cut your way to quality service delivery. If you work here currently or decide to get a job here, don't. Get out while you can because you will be considered expendable. It doesn't matter if you are student-facing, IT, support team, faculty, etc. Your leadership will have no hesitations about laying you off to ensure they can keep their bonuses.

Cons

Exec leadership, lack of bench strength, poorly run and 'clicky' HR, too many initiatives without well defined strategy. it's the worst leadership I've ever had in my 30 years in the workforce.

Cons

The company want to change and it is leaving behind the best work from the past. They also cannot stop laying employees off. Every several weeks someone is being laid-off. This is a lack of leadership and an HR department that is not pushing back.

Cons

Lack of leadership and business Strategy (Stock has falling from 74.03+ in 2009 to 18.19+ in 2013) No 401k match unless you commit 15% and then it is only a fraction of a percentage value. Management is made up of employees who are trying to protect their job; I actually have witnessed senior management informing employees that they will never succeed because another director does not like them. Senior management will directly try to fire or remove employees they do not like (I have actual evidence from past emails) Removed bonus; raises; performance gifts; employee recognition; and promotion platform Degrees from the University of Phoenix.... Lol (A Joke)

Cons

New leadership brought a slew of new people from leaderships former employer and resulted in a re-org and loosing a lot of good people, resulting in a few short term wins and a corrosion orf what was a strgon culture

Cons

Miopic vision by leadership who spend too much time trying to motivate the unmotived troops. Leadership team knows what's wrong but has no vision to fix it and would rather have order takers than idea generators. Contraction of the workforce, both intended and unintended, have left few teams doing too much work with shoddy results. Microsoft products are leaving the building and with it the culture is shifting back 40 years with the hope that by reliving the past they can recapture the golden era of the company.

Cons

The leadership was taken over by people more concerned with their own resumes and cronies. Good talent is leaving left and right and no one is stopping them.

Cons

Morale has been trending down for years. Constant layoffs, living in fear of next layoff. Current leadership is from outside the industry and struggles to create go to market strategy that is effective. Constant change means its also hard to measure long term success.

Cons

All around is chaos and disorganization. Constant RIFs and reorgs have doomed morale; not sure it's retrievable. Attrition is taking the best and the brightest, as well as the tribal knowledge and experience, left after the RIFs. Pay increases are a joke and everyone gets the same thing--whether they actually do any work or not. There is no access to training or conferences for continuing development or career advancement. Most middle management is incompetent. Upper management are brand new (again) and trying to remake a 200+ person org into a mirror of a successful 20 person group by fixing what isn't broken. Complete sea change in software development methodology because new management just didn't get it and they used to be PMs so they want everything run traditional PMO way. There is very little real information about vision and mission any more; it's all rah rah pep rally unless they need something from us; like writing letters to Congress. And if I hear Sajor say one more time, "I really appreciate all the hard work you all do" in that condescending voice I might throw up. I want to say the vision of making advancement through education available to all is great but I have learned it really is all about making money; the constant focus on $$--having to cut budgets and then still having to find other ways to cut costs (to ridiculous levels) after that--is all we hear about any more.

Cons

There is nothing remarkable about this company. The benefits are average and it goes down hill from there. There is really no culture or bond that ties people together. People might like their co-workers, but no one is excited the company and it’s prospects. In fact, most people have no clue what is going on outside their division. The left hand has no clue what the right hand is doing and there is a fair amount of redundancy. The company is in clearly in crisis and everyone can feel it. University of Phoenix is a damaged brand that depends on Title 4 student loan money, GI Bill funds, and international students. The product is actually not bad at all but there are no admission standards and few academic standards. Read: Anyone can get in and everyone graduates with a degree. It is no surprise Congress is trying to shut down the student loan pipeline to online universities. Because UoP, the flagship product, is performing poorly and the company is overcorrecting, cutting corners everywhere it can. As a result, employees in other business units suffer. Leadership is nonexistant and there is no clear turnaround strategy. These days you'd be hard pressed to find many people who are inspired or motivated about the future. The company does not have the capacity to innovate, which is ironic because it sells a course called Innovator’s Accelerator to companies for an exorbitant price. It has tried really hard in the last 2-3 years and squandered tens of millions of dollars on education courses that have failed to gain traction in the market. It also purchased a promising edtech startup, staffed it mostly with existing employees, and ran it into the ground in 15 months. Because UoP takes government student loan money, there is a heavy compliance and legal review component that impedes many business activities and destroys economic value. Lawyers review all marketing material and vendor contracts with intense scrutiny, lots of wasted time and excessive requests for changes. The net result could add 2 months of time to a contract negotiation and many times vendors just don't want to work for us, because all our lawyers want to do is remove every last drop of liability from contracts. Apollo is a legal state and many people fear the wrath of our legal team, even C-level executives. Last quarter, the CEO told Wall Street that future of the company lies in corporate professional development products and services. This is a new initiative that Apollo started by reorganizing 3-4 business units / departments into one new one, but three months later there is no clear strategy or many products/services that exist or in development. Just confusion and chaos. Rumor has it that the professional development executive is desperate to buy companies in order to build out its professional development services and products. It’s a sad state of affairs here and unless there is a major shake up at the C-level this company is on what is going to be a long and slow death march.