Decent Starting Point, But Lacks Almost Everywhere Else - Program Design Associate Hello! Destination Management Employee Review

- THERE IS FAVORITISM HERE, but if you're careful and have the right vibe you'll get along with most people just fine most of the time. Just be cautious of certain people because they WILL stab you in the back. - High turnover rate. A lot of people come and go for several reasons and it is VERY unhealthy for a role that requires so much knowledge and extensive training to get the hang of. The workload ends up being offset to another poor soul because they decided to fire someone they didn't like. - Benefits (health, vision, etc) are mediocre at best and could be much better. - The only people who have your back are your coworkers in the same position you are. Managers will say they care about your well-being, but will overwhelm you with work if you let them and indirectly pressure that you need to get all of it done. They will say that "it's okay to ask for help", but countless people I knew asked for help and either never got any or got useless help. I cannot count how many times I asked for help or asked a question only to get a condescending answer back as if they were annoyed that I was asking genuine questions. - Managers in this department are NOT QUALIFIED. In many cases they know less than the people actually doing the work and often output proposals in contracts with MORE mistakes than their subordinates. They also will refuse to do their own jobs of updating templates in the system that make your life easier and ignore the priorities of what actually needs to be done. It's a combination of a lack of skills, logical/critical thought, and general intelligence of basic daily concepts that makes doing your own job much harder than it really needs to be. - Pay is WAY UNDER the market value for this kind of role and is absolutely not sustainable. Please do your research and advocate/negotiate for yourself or use this as a stepping stone job for the time being. - Overtime is advertised as "unlimited", but it isn't really. They don't like it when you pace yourself with your workload to get things done in a timely manner. They want you to glue your face to your screen for 8+ hours a day and be 100% efficient that whole time, which isn't realistic for the average human. Overtime is inevitable and should ideally provide some cushion to work at a steady pace without burning yourself out, but they don't like that. I'd understand if people were abusing overtime and clocking in 50-70 random hours for workloads that didn't require it, but in my experience most people hovered around the 45ish range, which is reasonable for most workloads. Unfortunately, forcing yourself to get all your work done in a 40 hour work week at this job isn't always realistic and trying to meet those deadlines at 100% efficiency within that time will burn you out very quickly. - You WILL work overtime, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Some weeks may only require 45 hours and others may require 50 - 60+ depending on the hotel and sales team you're on. - Your quality of life at this job will HEAVILY depend on what office you work at and what sales team you're on. Each sales team is assigned to work with a specific hotel in your area and most of the events you design will be for that hotel. If you're lucky, you'll get a great sales leader who's understanding, cooperates with you, and treats you as a partner rather than a subordinate. However, you may also be one of the unlucky people that gets paired with an incompetent salesperson at a high demand property that requires you to put in way more hours than your coworkers. - Managers refuse to acknowledge that some properties have heavier demands and should have 2 designers assigned to them so it's not all dumped onto one person. - The Sales Department are their gems. As I said, many of them are amazing to work with, but because they directly "make the money", management refuses to do anything if there's a bad apple. The responsibility will ALWAYS fall on you as the PD person if something goes wrong with a program and if there is conflict then it's very rare they will ever take action against the salesperson over you. If you make a mistake, it's counted against you. If the salesperson makes a mistake, then it's no big deal and you have to find a way to work with it because you have a deadline. - Your role will be treated as the child of the company. You will be made to feel as if you don't put in enough work or your work is easier than everyone else's OR that everyone else can do your job. The reality is that hardly anyone, besides your department, is trained on what you do and how to do it. This makes your role extremely valuable and crucial to their process, but you aren't payed or treated as such. - A big selling point they like to use against any of your potential complaints or criticisms is that "it was much harder before, you have it easy now". The people who have been there for longer pride themselves on what they had to endure before and it deters you from using your voice again on what could be done to better job satisfaction. - Last of all, if you ever get a Performance Improvement Review, start looking for new jobs IMMEDIATELY. Once this happens, interactions are very robotic and cold, and they start accusing you of things even if you have physical proof to defend yourself. It is essentially them putting their two weeks into you, so don't be caught off guard by it and proactively be on top of your job search during those two weeks. No matter what you do, they will give you very vague area of concerns and won't give you a solid reason as to why you're fired when the day comes. In reality, it's just because they don't like you anymore and prefer to spend the money hiring someone else rather than maintaining senior workers with solid experience on how to do the job. (Keep in mind that some of these points only apply to the people your management doesn't like. If you stay on good terms with most people, you may be able to cruise and bypass some of the things listed.)