Ellucian reviews

Politics. People are hired, promoted, and fired/laid off based on their ability or inability to play along with the politics versus doing a good job. Great work seems to be rarely rewarded while people who brown nose are consistently promoted. This hurts employee morale and causes good employees to leave. Also, there seems to be a noticeable amount of people who are not qualified for their positions, but were promoted based on their ability to brown nose. Due to politics, there is a fair bit of backstabbing. If you try to be helpful to a manager, expect it to be used against you. It is obvious which managers are not qualified for their jobs because the employees who are more knowledgeable and qualified are pushed out since the unqualified are scared their ineptness will be obvious. Usually these folks are holdovers from Datatel. When Datatel and SunGard Higher Education merged, it appears that the Datatel crew made sure to give themselves the ripe management positions. You can be penalized for being too good at your job. Some employees have been blackballed from moving into other positions because their manager didn't want to lose them. How is this helpful? All it does is incentivize employees to leave the company all together. Pay increases average about 2% for those in the field and on the ground. Management easily receives large bonuses for not really doing a whole lot. Needless requirement for employees to be in the office 60% of the time, which is strange for a technology solutions and software company. Company preaches a set of values but practices the polar opposite.

Very negative energy employer. For consultants, your value is as a billable "head"; senior leaders have no interest in learning how you could use your broader skills/knowledge to help grow the business. Quite hierarchical. Missed sales targets in 2013 and 2014 is off to a very slow start, and Ellucian is not positioned well to compete with Workday and PeopleSoft Cloud market entry in 2015. Layoffs routine most quarters for the past two years. Employee engagement survey reveals high levels of active disengagement. Management-by-fear-of-job-loss is a norm. Former SGHE employees appear targeted for elimination. Extremely long hours, culture of night/weekend work; traveling consultants can expect to be on the road every week they do not have as vacation. Bonus plan measures are not items controlled/influenced by our performance or behavior so smack of ridiculous. Benefits for all have been reduced over the last two years, and more benefits reductions are on the horizon. Stack-ranking is common practice. Managers required to rate 10%+ of employees as low performers, in every work unit. No career paths or support for growth. Outside of HR, no women in senior leader roles. Strong, internal, women candidates passed over for inexperienced, external, men, including some friends of management. Not a supportive work environment for women who would like to grow a career. Chronic reorganitis in Consulting Services has impacted morale as a result of having had a new manager every six months on average for the past three years. It is not uncommon for a manager to supervise 22-30 people, for a manger to never have met a direct report, and for your client facing work to never be observed by your management. Clients are not longer provided with an opportunity to provide feedback on consultant performance, eliminating a key method of identifying opportunity for improvement or to provide recognition. There is pressure from HR to bring new hires in at market rates they have determined (without consultation/validation by unit managers), while high performing, long term employees - often in a higher grade position - are paid significantly less than this "market rate", with no plan for salary equity reviews as standard in the future. It is clear that remote employees are treated as second-class citizens as compared to those that work in the corporate office. New directive is that all future hires who manage must work from an office location (to reduce costs and leverage office space), a clear step backwards, and a clear impediment to hiring the best candidates, no matter where they live. Many people are open about job-hunting, and several key managers have left in the last 6 months, are leaving soon, or are actively searching for a better work culture. Finding new employment is challenging; an excessively restrictive non-compete contract is required of all employees, and Ellucian is actively taking legal action against several folks who've left in the last 6-8 months and moved to other companies (though not in a higher ed unit at that company.) This leaves many team members - including this one - feeling "trapped"...no way to move up, no way to move out within the higher ed industry.