Pros
You will meet some great people at this job (and some less wonderful people, see below). There are some really smart, interesting, gifted, and warm people who work here, and there is a real sense of camaraderie here. The lucky few who work in 'knowledge management distribution' also benefit from what appears to be completely hands-off management. That team seems to get away with a lot, though some of the people on that side really seem to be putting in good effort and actually caring. l. If you work on the MMS (Membership, Marketing and Sales) side, you're in for a ride... Sometimes I liked the work of putting together conferences and helping out members, and it was nice to see that many of the members earnestly liked interacting with you. I would have liked to have learned more about economic development when I was there, and I got the sense that that field can be really beneficial, but I also w was told by my colleagues that the kind of economic development that IEDC works in is pretty simplistic, lowest-common-denominator kind of stuff. Sometimes the members I talked to laughed at IEDC for being kind of silly and primitive.
Cons
The place is super-disorganized, with changing strategies, goals, projects. Mostly driven by the whims of the CEO, but all efforts to standardize/innovate/plan-by-anything more than the seat of the pants gets slapped down. project schedules? Don't even try. Budgets? Good luck seeing that. Information is handed out on a-need-to-know basis, and there's a 50% chance that the person who is telling you that doesn't know because the goals and objectives have already been changed. Half the time you hear about something going on you are like "WTF!" because it either goes directly against everything you have already heard, or just doesn't make any sense, and you never hear why that got changed. There is absolutely no commitment to training employees or giving them opportunities (travel, education, certifications, networking), even though those shouldn't be hard to come by what with all the members and being in DC and all. Management is whimsical to be generous. Senior managers are generally incompetent. It's not clear what their purpose or value-add is. The CEO is rarely around because he is mainly just enjoying free glad-handing and back-slapping around the country (the Board loves him and seems pretty oblivious to the disastrous conditions in the office), and doesn't participate in any decisionmaking (or even delegating sometimes) but then will swoop in at the last second to utterly micromanage things, usually in a really rude and unpredictable way. Good luck trying to explain why months of planning and deliberation had gotten you to where you are. This maybe explains why new employees often come in with cool ideas that get slapped down and they end up disheartened and not caring. Why care when there seems to be no effort, no culture, no reward or punishment whether work gets done well or poorly, if at all?! Eventually a lot of these usually leave. Super high turnover. For maybe 30 people who work there, expect as many as 10 to leave in a given year! Plus you have the bullies. There is a group of employees who are just mean, secretive, judgmental, unsupportive. They have each other's backs but nobody else's. In fact, they generally try to undermine both management and the junior staff. Longer-term employees tend to be rewarded because of their loyalty, not because of their competence. They either get some sweetheart deal of working from elsewhere, or they bitterly prowl the office, looking for ways to make themselves better by undercutting everyone else (sometimes even their 'friends' the other bullies). A lot of your time will be spent avoiding these people, until you face head-on conflict with them. Then the gloves come off, and you are sure to lose, since even though the bullies hate the CEO, he eggs them on and doles out special favors to his enforcers. I really wanted to like this job but the horrible culture, the disorganization, the mismanagement really killed it for me.