Pros
There is some scope for external training, though this is for things that more senior staff should be teaching you on the job. Problem is that you have to pay the company back if you have had more than three days' or so training in the year prior to leaving. Company share purchase scheme effectively adds 3% to your salary.
Cons
CGI does not have a graduate program, it employs graduates. There is no structured program of rotation or training. You get hired by CGI and are then expected to fend for yourself. It is not uncommon for graduates to spend weeks to months unassigned to a project with no guidance as to what they should be studying in order to make themselves usable within the company. Bait and switch is used to get people to join the company and to get people onto projects. For example, you my be hired for, or apply internally for, a Java development role to end up writing unit test scripts in a non-Java project. No attempt made to match graduates with work that aligns with their interests or skill-set or even their supposed career path. In one instance was told that I did not have enough Java experience for a junior development role (despite having more experience under my belt than most graduates) whereas a few months previously graduates were given the same role with no Java programming (and very little other) programming experience at all. I ended up working on small C programs and Perl scripts and writing pointless documentation. I had no previous experience with either language and no training – I had to teach myself what I needed to know in my own time. Abysmal internal IT systems – having seen them I would not wish to give CGI a contract for IT work. It is difficult to find information, links are often broken, and the audio seldom works properly on the internal conferencing software. Graduates are promised a relocation bonus if they have to relocate to join the company. However, they kept very quiet about this when I actually started and I was not the only person this happened to. CGI would rather employ contractors than train their own staff – there are contractors that have been there for over 3 years and in that time they did not bother training other staff (particularly graduates) to replace them (and the work was not so technical that graduates could not have performed it, it just would have taken a month or two of concerted project specific training). Insufficient office space at Leatherhead – some people working two to a desk. Not uncommon to find people spilling out of project offices into hot-desking areas. New starters on a project can find themselves seated in different areas or having to check who is not expected to be present that day in order to use somebody else's desk. Insufficient parking at Leatherhead office. Overflow parking is about 10 minute's walk from the office. However in many of the spaces you have to move your car before 17:00. Induction process consists of “Here's your laptop, this is the hot-desk booking system”. You are expected to arrange your own induction talk (which is just corporate drivel in any case). That being said, the induction process is typically better for contractors than it is for experienced hires for whom the process is better than for graduates. People will take on induction responsibilities because it looks good on your CV when it comes to performance evaluation time and then not bother with those responsibilities. PPP payment is crap. Mine worked out at about £7 per month for the time I was there. Technical career progression paths as laid out by HR do not bear any resemblance to how staff are actually used. For example, you could work as a 'developer' for several months and not gain a single competency on the path because you have been assigned to writing documentation instead of code. Lack of resources such as software licences and equipment. It was not unusual to find that you had to rearrange your working day around access to licences. I found myself working evenings because one project I was on did not have enough licences for one particular piece of software. It was not uncommon to find employees doing technical work on a single laptop screen because of the management refusal to buy external monitors. The appraisal process revolved around setting and achieving objectives and getting feedback from your colleagues. The objectives are supposed to be challenging so it is infuriating to find that whilst you have followed procedure other colleagues are given objectives by their people managers that amount to “do your job”. The feedback part is nonsense too. For example, someone leading a team of six would only need to perform their leadership responsibilities for one member and get positive feedback from them. The other five can be safely neglected. Poor workplace training practices. By way of analogy, if you can imagine getting into a car for your first driving lesson and the instructor telling you to drive from Land's End to John O'Groats and then getting out and instructing you to give him a call if you have any questions you will have a pretty good picture of what it is like.
