Trust the negative reviews, but take the Acumen job as a good learning opportunity if you don't have better options - Policy Lead Acumen Employee Review

3.0
8 Jul 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Overall speaking, this is a good place to get work experience/get started in healthcare career. -SAS training is provided, so if you are fresh grad it's a good place to start. -Very rigorous work for every request sent by clients and high standard for deliverables, you get well-trained here. -Most of the company funding comes from government contracts, so you get to work with government counterparts to learn a lot of healthcare policies and get exposure to policy making process. As government contractor, the job is stable and you don't need to worry about losing your job (unless you have performance issue). -Generous H1-B and green card sponsorship policy which is good for foreign workers. -Flexible working hours and remote work policy. -You have the option to cash out PTO once your accumulated PTO reaches certain amount.

Cons

Personal growth or career development depends on your supervisor, upper management is a joke. -Work life balance is difficult to have, since Acumen primarily works on government contracts and those usually have low budget. As a result, they don’t have enough funding to hire more people, so each person is stretched a lot. -Leadership team is not dedicated to resolve the work life balance issue, as someone in the upper management team said that “people at senior level working 50 hours a week is normal“. That was not miscommunication, as that message was in a written form. -You get decent-good amount of PTO, but whether you can actually use it is another question. Someone from the leadership team used to ask a person to work on an "urgent project" while knowing that person would be on 2 days PTO after NOT having taken a break for 6 months. -Management intend to apply “quick fix” and does patches when issues occur, rather than trying to implement permanent/long run fix, especially when there are understaffed issues. -Your experience and growth depends on your team, well, mostly your direct supervisor. If you decided to join Acumen, pray that you’ll be assigned to a good team. -Starting salary is low. -Benefits package is not great (but decent, especially if this is your first job). -The H1B visa is cap-exempt nonprofit visa. Difficult to switch to for-profit companies once you are on this visa. But this helps Acumen to keep foreign workers to stay--if they provided for-profit/regular H1B visa the retention will be way worse. -HR doesn't advocate for you. They implement what the leadership team decides. They also claim that they put together a lot of useful resources, but they rarely advertise those to employees, so you have to delve in the intranet yourself.

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Acumen Response
4y
Thank you for your review. We appreciate hearing from our former employees. We are disappointed that you felt you did not have a good work/life balance. We encourage all our employees to take advantage of our PTO policies and paid holidays each year. Additionally, it is important to note that we value the contributions of employees of diverse backgrounds, including foreign nationals. We encourage discussing sponsorship policy details and requirements with our HR director.

Explore other reviews about Acumen

5.0
27 Mar 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Flexible hours Great work Fun

Cons

There really aren’t very many

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Acumen Response
1y
We appreciate that you took time to share your perspective on Glassdoor. Thank you!
3.0
9 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Good work-life balance - The people there are nice - They allow for inter-team movement and collaboration for more diverse work

Cons

- Pay is low for the work and very low for the location - Upper management changes the long-term goals frequently, causing confusion about the direction of updates - The industry is going through a squeeze, which doesn't help - Experience is very dependent on your team and your manager

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Acumen Response
1mo
Thanks for sharing your impressions about Acumen. Your feedback is timely and relevant, which should be helpful to potential applicants and recent grads to take into consideration during their own career exploration. Best wishes to you!
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