Pros
If you have noticed, there is a long review that was supposedly written by a single management person down below. This is rather fake, because the management has been telling us to write articles shorter than 500 words, so I do not think one person is capable of writing the whole thing by his/herself. It's quite clear that multiple persons wrote the review and the senior management is involved because some of the statistics were definitely not known to the rest. why is this important? Because instead of engaging their employees as the company rightly should, the company chose to come online, on this platform to write the long chunk of words. For whom? Here's a newsflash, if the company has treated its employees right, the the employees wouldn't be here and the management wouldn't have to change the company's image around. 1) The authors talked about a selection bias, and how all the disgruntled people are here to leave reviews. However, if you click on the reviews for top companies, companies that employees do feel proud working for) like Google, they, mysteriously do not have such selection bias. In a normal company, in a normal situation, employees' attitude follows a normal distribution curve. Majority of the people are supposedly apathetic, and there are maybe 10-20% who are either super excited to work for the company, or hate the company. Judging by the number of departures from the analyst's side since the new head of Asia came to Singapore (I will count this for you): 6 (out of the original team 12) since Feb 2014 this is DESPITE the lure of the acquisition bonus (the one the management said had reduced people to tears), it is becoming an excuse that 'it is normal, people quit around the two year mark'. This two -year mark under any circumstances should not have even been normal. I don't even know why this is considered normal. 2) The review also mentioned that the size of the analyst team has expanded by three times.But this does not equate to having many experts to work with, here's the reality. a) Most sector teams have 1 to 3 person(s) doing GLOBAL coverage. I am not sure which other companies will allow this. How many developments are happening globally each day? b) The company emphasizes a lot on cross-team collaboration, which sounds great except that at the same time the management is also saying 'it is normal' for people to leave around the two-year mark. So do you think are you learning from experts in other sectors or countries? c) Essentially the research team expanded horizontally (by increasing the number of sectors covered) NOT vertically and you know what they say about Jack and trades.. d) I am quite speechless about the titles as well. Imagine in a team of three, you have the head of ABC sector, senior analyst of ABC sector and then there's you. So, this means if the head or the senior are do not move elsewhere, it is hard for you to get promoted. 3) BMI produces talents who then jump to better companies. Some of the people I know, jumped even before the 'normal 2 year mark' so I am not sure exactly what training was provided for them to jump to these companies. The fact is that they already have great credentials (dean's list, top in school, CFA) even before stepping into BMI, and THESE collectively propel them to the next level. Also I am not sure why this company is proud of sending their employees away. This is not a school where you collect all the achievements of everyone and post it on your website. This just tells me how you fail to retain your talents. Also, do not assume that if they joined these big companies right away, they will take longer to get to where they are today. This is a fallacy that small companies love to make: because everyone has to learn quickly = they have skills people in the big companies don't. Wrong, big companies have so many sophisticated training for eager employees and going by what BMI preaches "A great company....if you stick around and work hard", the same can go for you working hard in a big company (except with better training and benefits). 4) Which brings me to the next point. School. One of the authors mentioned that school is cushy. Maybe that is the case in UK. This is NOT the case in Singapore. The number of projects and deadlines we have to meet is insane, it makes coming to BMI a joy because the workload is potentially half that of what we have in school. To us, BMI IS cushy, because of the few tasks we have to do. If this is stressing the author who wrote that segment, I think the company needs to talk to the author about ways to increase productivity Here's what a normal analyst needs to do a) find news b) analyse the development (to be finished in by lunch) c) afternoon = update databases and do reports d) leave by 6 pm sharp. Now tell me what you have to do in school. 5) Training. Picture this. Talents leave the company quickly. Inexperience people get promoted to management team. Worse still, people whom are disliked get promoted into the management team. And then these are the people who train you. There were essentially two trainings that all of us have gotten. "how to write the BMI way" and presentation skills. I mean we were told to sit at the Bloomberg and were taught some line drawing (it is known as technical skills elsewhere), but more often than not, the person who is teaching gets the trend wrong. Otherwise we hear insightful statements like "(the stock price) will either go up or down". Like, as if we do not know that already. 6) Data. is virtually non-existent. This company claims to be in the information service/market intelligence sector, but refused to buy data or try to develop its own (primary research). Most data come from countries' statistical books or World Bank etc. I don't know how sophisticated the analysis can be when the data we have are free-for-all online. 7) No company is perfect. Sure, no company is, I agree. However, I don't understand why when the company are doing great, the management will say stuff like 'yes! We have beaten EIU, we are the second in the sector good job everyone' and then when people start to say negative things about the company, the management went 'no company is perfect. Other people talk about the same negative stuff in other companies too'. Classic politics speech really. Why not try this? Try to improve the company so that it becomes a company every other company aims to become like instead of staying in the rut with the other 'imperfect companies'. The authors said the company strives to improve. Really? The IT issue is possibly the simplest and fastest thing the company can solve but even that took more than two years. Let's take a step back, who in the world will decide to invest in a system that will ONLY run in old versions of Internet Explorer (of all things it has to be IE) and Windows XP? How many years have analysts been telling the company about the reward structure for sales and how it is unfair to them? How many times have analysts told the company about the lack of data? How many times have clients complained about reports that are not updated and the company still continues to use the freelance model? Finally, if this comes across as a disgruntled employee, then I think the management need to recalibrate your judgment skills. These are the words of a sad employee (and I dare say many other sad employees) who once loved this company, who considered staying here for long and working hard, despite the low pay. PPS: I second a couple of the review below. Nobody has the right to dictate others to say good morning.
Cons
-sales teams lack ethics they lie to clients about the qualifications of analysts, the number of analysts, the stuff we covered etc etc anything that can be lied about, they will do it. - management has no clue how to navigate through the 21st century - weak IT system - virtually zero benefits - no annual bonuses - extreme biasness to sales (e.g. they get to go for overseas trip as a reward for hitting the target, but not the analysts who wrote the articles)