inventory specialist

maintenance person

equipment operator

recreation assistant

firefighter

Albemarle

Top management is delusional. IT is a dreadful nightmare to deal with. You will have no clear direction, or purpose. If you do exactly what you are told, wrong or right, you will blend in to the grey cubicles and be fine. No one has life in their facial expressions. Slim career advancement unless you really brown nose. 

Top execs take care of their own, no matter how bad things get. Don't expect the right decisions to be made, on anything. You will also have to work 10X harder to get anything done due to too many people involved, bad internal systems, IT restrictions, no accountability or ability to make decisions.

It's the most literal definition of corporate that there is. 

If you need the job, do what your told and keep your head down. If not, don't waste your time, you will regret it. Also, keep in mind that if a company constantly preaches their "core values"....avoid them...because that means they do not believe in them. It's just for the shareholders, like everything else. 

First of all, Albemarle is a fine chemical company (not oil). The pay is amazing. In 3 years time I went from seventeen to thirty two dollars an hour. The benefits are great as well. But for every great thing there is a price. The work is tough and stressful. Its basically chemistry on a 4000 gallon scale. You are in charge of using chemistry to create a pharmaceutical intermediate and if you "overcook" a batch... well thats time and money wasted. The shifts are 12 hours long so you either love it or you hate it. Sometimes there is a sense of brotherhood between operators and other times its incredibly back stabby. The supervisors (not all of them) can be your worst nightmare. They are either completely absent when you need help or direction or they treat you like you are stupid when you ask for it. It was always short staffed and so much was expected from you while you were there.

Albemarle prior to relocating its headquarters to Charlotte is a completely different animal than what it was in  Louisiana. The company had a great culture, workers were happy, training and growth were a priority. Since the pandemic & a lot of newer younger executives came in & hired their friends & people who looked like them and they protect themselves. It became a very toxic place to exist in & from what I’ve heard since my departure, its only gotten worse & the pay for incoming talent is much lower. 

Albemarle is a great place to start working and gain experience.  I have been here for my whole career so far (7 years and counting) and you get to experience many different things throughout your career.  If there was a downside to Albemarle, I would say it is the lack of focus on the future and the amount of knee jerk reactions that take place.  As far as advancement goes, your basically either have to be open to move sites or perform an expat assignment to move up.  There are not many levels of middle management, so your exposure to high profile individuals can remain high in stressful times/projects.  This can function as a way to show what you have as well as a way to show your failures.

Albemarle has an increasing atrition rate for young and old employees not in management.  There are no project professionals in management yet they make all the decisions on projects.  Often those decisions are wrong and they cause everyone to jump through hoops to try and achieve impossible time lines.  Currently they have decided to try and outsource to 23rd party engineering companies without owner representative oversight which is a recipe for high cost over runs and a massive amount of change orders.  Management preaches core values but does not follow the values they try and instill.   Overall the current direction of the company is not sustainable and caution should be taken if accepting employment.

From the perspective of a lab rather than the plant:

Overall, Albemarle is a great company to work for.  Pay can probably be adjusted up, but is fair.  Benefits are pretty good, and flexibility is great.  They put a lot of focus on personal well being, development, diversity, and inclusion.  They tend to overload their middle management with projects that probably don't need to be done.  Due to their focus on personal advancement, turnover in labs to other positions within the company are common, leading to a process of continual training.

They underpaid people and justified it with pretty decent 401k at 11%. The company itself was alright, the problem was with the people and leadership. There are some people that just obnoxious and tried to sabotage people's career just because they feel that you would be a threat to their job security; and unfortunately these people have been with the company for long and for some reason stays in the position. 
The Lithium business was also falling apart, the R&D side of things appears to be just for demonstration purposes without really thinking of making actual products. A good place to cut teeth though. 

I loved the atmosphere at my plant because I planned my work days with the supervision in notes and just knowing my plant and what needed to be done.  If I needed additional help on a project, it was easily scheduled.  A typical day would be taking samples to the lab to and record results, make rounds checking all equipment through site and sound, house keeping, 5 S duties, run plant by computer.  
The hardest part would be during maintenance shut down twice per year locking out all pumps and getting tanks ready for inspection.

What is the best part of working at the company?
Good money bad environment, push rates first safety second or third. Better know someone that works there or don't bother.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
Poor management and even worse training.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Cliquish, if you live in the area and drink with your shift you will do fine.  Don't  have to be good at your job as long as your good at drinking and partying.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
Nightmare, one disaster after another old equipment and even older ways of doing things.

Great place to work. Everyday at Albemarle was a new adventure, always learning something new and interesting. The culture at /albemarle was very safety oriented and management preached the fact that safety is number 1. This is something that I will carry on to my next and evry career. This job also gave me the option to participate on the emergency response team where I was able to learn skills such as CPR and interior fire fighting which is something I have always been interested in. Fire fighting is something I feel we should all know in this specific job field and I am glad I will be able to take these skills elsewhere

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Inventory specialist 10 salaries reported	$22.50 per hour
Maintenance person 4 salaries reported	$19.82 per hour
Equipment operator 5 salaries reported	$22.97 per hour
Recreation assistant 2 salaries reported	$15.34 per hour
Firefighter 2 salaries reported	$18.35 per hour

Working at Albemarle: Company Overview and Reviews

Albemarle

Albemarle Ratings

Popular jobs at Albemarle

Salary Satisfaction

Job Seeker Tools

Employer Tools

Browse

Stay Connected