Pros
- This job suits anyone wanting to do customer-orientated tasks in a fairly relaxed full time job, enjoys speaking with people, and doesn't mind being dictated to - relaxed atmosphere in office - Since I left, wages have supposedly increased for office staff (i.e. above minimum wage)
Cons
Lingoda's main issue is that it still belives itself to be a passionate start-up (which I'm sure it started out as), but as it has grown to a mid-sized company, functions like a large corporation in terms of its treatment of office staff, teachers, as well as the students. This means Lingoda works in a way that is riddled with contradictions: - They search for highly qualified and motivated candidates to work in their office, who have a real passion for learning and teaching languages, and want to use this knowledge to advance learning online. They are excited to work in the advertised "non-hierarchical and passionate start-up". However the reality is that Lingoda is extremely hierarchical, with all decisions micro-managed at the middle management level, and no freedom to take your own initiative or fully discuss the various problems present. - Condescending attitude to teachers, who work for minimum wage, and are often highly educated and excellent in their work - Bizarre decisions taken at the senior and middle-management levels, with no discussion with the employees about how they perceive this will affect either students or teachers - Customers often treated without respect - large changes to Lingoda's system are made with customer's only notified hours before - No focus on quality of materials, quality of lessons, or real teacher training. - Management are unable to deal with criticism from staff, do not take input easily, and use a system of textbook learnt management techniques Examples of mis-management: - Large government funds received for refugee programme to educate them in German, but huge mismanagement of said programme in terms of enabling refugees to access and get the best out of it, means a large majority did not benefit - Weekly team meeting where focus is on discussing what you have completed this week: this makes sense if you have project-based roles, with ability to create own tasks and goals, this does not make sense if you are engaged in the same tasks each week, and where all criticisms or comments on future changes are glossed over
