Likely the shortest stint of your professional (services) career - Anonymous employee Vena Solutions Employee Review

Where do I even begin? The professional services department is very poorly run. Onboarding: this is practically non-existent. New consultants are taken through the most basic product training and then given an outdated case study to complete. Once those 3 weeks have passed, you’re put on your “shadow” project. Unfortunately, this is a trick. You will eventually be given the project and told a more senior consultant will support you. This is also a trick—because you’ll likely be paired with someone who’s too busy and does not have the time for you and/or they do not have the appropriate skills to mentor you and nurture your growth. The cherry on top is that you’ll be working with assets that you have never seen before and can break pretty easily. The unfortunate part of this, is that consultants are set up to fail. And then this trickles down to affecting the client. The solution is too complex and being told to read Confluence articles or go to SA Office Hours for your 5 min of fame to learn, is not an appropriate path to set up consultants for success. I’d love to challenge management to step into the shoes of a consultant for a week, to truly see just how much pressure they’re under to deliver while completely faking their knowledge. Unrealistic Timelines/Projects: nearly every project is misscoped. You’ll be told that you’re working on a foundation project, which is supposed to be an out-of-the-box solution. Unfortunately, it’ll quickly turn into a custom project once you start working with the client, but you’ll still be pushed to meet the original timeline. Be prepared to just be handed project after project with Project Managers that just schedule all sorts of client meetings and expect you to have your deliverables completed yesterday. Billables/Utilization: the two keywords that are shoved down your throat, and you’ll come to hate. Because you’ll be spending the majority of your time fiddling and trying to figure out how to tailor the solution to your respective client, you either need to lie about your hours or work into your personal time to meet that 75% target. If you don’t meet that target, you’ll hear about it at every 1:1 meeting. The unfortunate part to all of this, is that it creates an environment where it’s not in a more seasoned consultant’s interest to help newer consultants because their utilization will take a hit. Toxic Management: brace yourself for a toxic relationship. Management will tell you that they want you to reach out to them with any issues. Unfortunately, when you take them up on that offer, you will be gaslit—everything will be spun around and you’ll be made to feel like the issue is your fault and you just need to figure it out. Turnover: PS likely has the highest turnover in the whole company. They will tout that many people have moved internally. This is partially true, but many people have actually left due to poor onboarding and being overworked. There are consultants who have been with the company for less than a year who are second and third in seniority, that says something. If you’re thinking this role is like management consulting, it’s not—it’s more geared towards implementation. You’ll be cleaning up convoluted templates and trying to fit a square peg in a round hole in order to meet client requirements. I would not wish Vena PS on my worst enemy because of all of the above, and for the fact that you’ll basically be made to feel completely incompetent while not having the tools to succeed at your disposal. P.S. there’s a review from June 2021, and it also includes a very accurate account of PS. It’s unfortunate that the response to that post is all fluff, which is an added glimpse as to why PS is so poorly run.