financial advisor

administrative assistant

paraplanner

client services coordinator

client services associate

Ameriprise Financial

Ameriprise is a great opportunity for those with customer service skills to get a foot in the door of the corporate environment. They have decent benefits and easily the best PTO structure (at least on paper) that I’ve ever seen. 

Quality of life at this company will depend entirely upon the leaders you’re working under. If you’re working on a phone team (which you most likely would be for several years at Ameriprise, unless you’re willing to kiss up) every second of your day is mapped out for you, and Ameriprise leadership maintains the right and the ability to scrutinize any and every aspect of what you do, at all times. Every phone call, email and chat message you conduct whether internal or external is being tracked at all times, and can be and most will at some point be used to incriminate you in some way. 

Ameriprise does not make an effort to meet its employees in the middle when it comes to remote work, and it’s leadership does not care about your mental health or your work life balance. 

Numerous policies relating to requests to leave early or using PTO are outlined within the company’s resources, but are not enforced by HR, or adhered to by all leaders. 

Phone teams track your performance by metrics like survey scores, hold time, and other daily goals that each agent is expected to meet. Specific goals may vary from team to team, but you will be babysat and micromanaged unless you are willing to sacrifice your mental health at the altar of arbitrary stats. 

Many of these metrics and your track record in meeting the goals for them are used to determine your pay (year end reviews with your direct leader will decide how big your bonus is and whether or not you get the annual pay raise) and dictate the hours you are scheduled to work. 
The survey scores specifically are a key component of this measurement, and Ameriprise does not assign or track them accurately. This means that your stats are liable to be penalized by a poor survey sore that was meant for another phone representative, and likewise you might get credit for an interaction you did not participate in. Corporate leadership has been made aware of this and has refused to do anything to correct it because it “affects everyone the same.” The technology that Ameriprise provides to its employees leaves much to be desired in the realm of reliability, and product teams will often launch new features to either the tools their employees use, or those made available to clients conducting business online with little to no testing or feedback from the frontline teams that support those tools, and this practice results in a spike in call volume, a dive in overall performance. And a major hit on client satisfaction. This pattern repeats itself as often as weekly depending on what processes your team supports, and no one in leadership or technology cares to change it. 

The company does have a system in place for associates to submit and work on projects to improve processes, but this almost always comes back to “this improvement is not in the budget/poses a risk to compliance.” In short, they don’t care how broken their tools are. 

If you want a job with this company, avoid contact center openings at all costs, and instead apply for something in processing or find a local advisor’s office. The PTO and retirement/healthcare benefits are excellent, but not worth the stress that comes with working for inept bosses and a CEO that refuses to adjust pay for inflation. 

A quote from the CEO when asked if he planned to make these adjustments due to the decline in the value of the dollar (a direct result of the policies put in place by a presidential administration that Ameriprise’s “woke” corporate culture supports) : “if you don’t like how you’re being compensated, go work elsewhere.” 

These are the words of a man making it evident that he doesn’t understand or care about the concerns of his employees. And the mindset of ignorance and greed made evident by the man on top, echo down throughout the firm. 

In short, if you care about your work life balance, want a flexible work-from-home job, or want to work for a company that means what they say and says what they mean; if you want to work for an employer that has the best interests of both its clients and it’s employees at heart? Don’t put all your hopes on this racehorse, she will ultimately fail you. 

I was a sales agent for the De Pere, WI Auto & Home Insurance call center for about 6 months. I knocked their quota's out of the park the few moths I was there, but quickly became bored and out of my mind nuts with the repetition of the same call after call after call.

You can make some decent money if you stick with it and are a good sales person, but there is often mandatory overtime and your first year is chocked full of night time hours as well as every other Saturday. Your stuck with the shift you choose upon job offer for about 1 year. At that time based on your performance you can choose better shifts if available. If you are in the bottom half of agents then a shift is essentially handed to you again, wether it's better than your current shift or not it does not matter. It's now your new shift take it or leave it.

It's all performance based scheduling and advancement and every single stat is directly tied into your telephone, on top of sales numbers. Everything is done via phone from logging into your work day to how long you listen to voicemails to your logged out for break time. The phone tells them your story and you go over these stats every few weeks with your manager.

The benefits at this company I have to say are outstanding. The health insurance etc is almost second to none in the USA anymore, and you also get a lot of paid time off between 3 - 4 weeks in your first year alone. Getting that time off may actually be another story but I won't go into that here. They do offer retirement benefit plans like a 401k that is matched well, and even have a pension plan after 1 year of service. Pension plans in the USofA are all but gone for us working bees and usually now only afforded to the exec's. This plan is a nice perk and especially attractive if you are the type of person looking to get into a company where you can work 20-30 years and actually still have a chance at retiring.

This all being said, in between the not most ideal family hours, the call after call after call after call that are all the same one after another, and the bright lights and drama of call center cube life I simply couldn't take it anymore and essentially bailed on the place. I have no regrets and am glad I moved on as I'm just more of a freedom horse and it wasn't my scene. But overall I have to say that in today's American workforce which is almost non existent at best, Ameriprise Auto & Home truly is a good company that pays a decent wage and has great benefits. If you don't mind the call center/cubicle life and are the type of person who can go in zone out and go home it's a decent place to do just that. They always seem to be hiring as turnover is high like any call center gig.

•	Review the Business requirements and ensure the testability of these requirements.
•	Developed QA project plan, Test Plan, Test cases for the QA Phase of the Global Data Warehouse.
•	Responsible for coordinating off-shore and On-shore Test resources.
•	Reported defects and status of the defects in HP QC.
•	Validation the XMLs to verify the integrity of data received from DWH systems to BOA Customer HUB database. 
•	Performed Data driven tests with Quick Test Professional (QTP) to test the application for different sets of data.
•	Extraction, Transaction and Loading was done using different Components and different expressions using Data Stage to create test data.
•	Developed complex SQL queries to verify the data loaded into the target tables. Validate the test data using MS access, TOAD, UNIX & MS Excel
•	Connect to telnet to the UNIX environment and download, transport test data files
•	Coordinated and participated in generating the test data required for various test activities.
•	Generate QA progress reports on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
•	Communicated risks and escalated issues to supervising Manager as required.
•	Communicate QA progress, % of test cases executed per day to the supervising authority
•	Conduct walk through meetings with various teams in understanding the QA processes, bug life cycles, QA documentation 
•	Created ETL test data for all ETL mapping rules to test the functionality of the SSIS packages.
•	Performed database integrity check using SQL and Unix Shell Scripts
•	Performed Functional, Regression, Data Integrity, System, Compatibility, and User Acceptance Testing including GUI testing 
•	Involved in backend testing with SQL, check the data integrity and referential integrity.
•	Gather feedback from the manager to incorporate changes as required for the QA process documentation
•	Written several complex SQL queries to validate the Business Objects XIR3 reports.
•	Worked with multiple outsourcing companies and efficiently worked as a liaison b/n the client and multiple outsourcing companies.
•	Extracted Data from Teradata using Informatica Power Center ETL and DTS Packages to the target database including SQL Server and used the data for reporting purposes. 
•	Work with teammates to resolve inter and intra teammate issues without affecting the project timelines
•	Escalate database downtimes and any issues that could potential create hindrance to testing progress
•	Perform automated QA reports using Quality Center and Start Team dashboards 
•	Conduct pre release meetings and documentation approvals
•	Train users and help in conducting UAT

Responsibilities	
•	Understanding the business requirements
•	Resource/Effort estimation and tracking
•	Impact analysis of existing modules to find overall cost to implement change requests
•	Independent test cases writing and independent unit testing of the modules developed at offshore
•	Requirement Gathering & Analysis from Client.
•	Onsite – Offshore Coordination.
•	Develop the mappings using the ETL tool Informatica.
•	Preparation of detailed design, code walkthrough.
•	Resolving technical and design issues.
•	Production Support using scheduling tool TWS (Tivoli Work Scheduler).
•	Creation of UNIX scripts.
•	Performing independent unit testing using SQL Developer.
•	Design & Development of application.
•	As part of Data Integration Center of excellence, worked on numerous PoC’s (Proof of Concept’s) using Informatica 9.1
•	Involved in creation of best practice frame works for Informatica ETL code review checklists
•	Creation of numerous UNIX scripts for the validations and maintenance related activities in the ETL Farm.
•	Working with various teams across teams in performance tuning and troubleshooting Informatica workflows and mappings
•	Used unique feature of Informatica Power Center 9.1 to run same workflow concurrently with various set of runtime parameters.
•	Use of Web services in the Batch mode provided by the vendor.
•	Worked on the Informatica Metadata Manager tool.
•	Designed and developed the complex ETL mappings.
•	Used Lookup Transformation to reduce runtime for all the source files instead of joiner transformation.
•	Scheduling of different workflows sequentially and monitoring.

Description:  CDS Data Stack module involves the latest Informatica 9.1 version for the batch load. We replaced the existing Mainframe and SQL loader batch load with ETL Informatica 9.1. As a part of this project, I have worked on creation of 32 interfaces using Informatica 9.1 which involves the File load on a daily basis, Bulk load and various new items like configuring the web services and creating the SSL (Service Secured Layer) certificates for the web services using Informatica 9.1 and introduced the new tool Informatica Metadata manager and worked on this tool as a part of this project. UNIX scripts are used for all the validations and TWS scheduling tool is used for running the jobs in production. I have been the onsite coordinator (new role) for this project and learned the business processes and implementation tasks for a project.

i was hired as a financial advisor and had to go through a 10-week trial by fire training course with other new-hires. If we didn't each get 5 new clients (the new clients had to spend at least $500 on a financial plan) in the ten weeks then we were to be terminated even though we had spent about a thousand dollars on our training and licensing materials over a three month stress-filled, unpaid studying period.

I thought I was getting a great career advancement but I was glued to my seat 7-days per week to cold-call leads and try to get potential clients in to meet with sales managers who would then sell financial plans to people who couldn't afford them. The manager who sold a plan to our new client would get the commission while we still got only minimum wage. The plan costs were arbitrary dependent upon how much the manager thought the client would pay. I was horrified by the dishonesty and greed of management and so I ultimately quit because I couldn't be part of duping my clients. I cared about these people whom I'd brought in as clients! We weren't allowed to tell the clients how things really worked and so all I could do was quit.

My pay was minimum wage. I was effectively forced to work 7 days per week and subjected to management plugging in to my phone calls to dictate to me what to say to the potential client I was on the phone with. It was very stressful to have a manager standing over me telling me what to say to the sweet, trusting old lady whom I had just befriended on the phone. Managers didn't care about the clients, only about the bottom line.

It was entirely boiler room mentality. I had to sneak out over my lunch hour in order to quit without facing drama and pressure. Then I was harassed by phone to come back. Then I was told I was fired even though I had quit. I told the manager she couldn't fire me because I had faxed a 2-week notice along with a letter from a psychiatrist giving me 2-weeks of stress leave because I hadn't been able to sleep in three months (the time I was involved with this job). I found out why the manager wanted to fire me instead of letting my 2-weeks count down. It was because my last acquired client had bought life insurance and the commission check was coming to me because my ten week training period had just ended.

The licensing I acquired (Series 7, Series 66, Life & Health, Annuities) are the best thing I got from this job. I was able to start a career in insurance and finance elsewhere.

What to say?  YMMV in this role, which is highly dependent on the personality mix of those around you at a given branch.  In mine, it was a doozy.  We didn't have an ops leader (or THAT "leader's" leader) for years but, thanks to the conventional wisdom of the powers-that-be up in Minnesota, they shoe-horned two complete dolts into said roles, neither of whom had any management experience whatsoever.  You can probably already figure out where this is headed but, in a nutshell, it ended badly for a number of us because we weren't the proverbial "teacher's pets" that they wanted us to be.  So, in no short order, they managed to orchestrate increasingly ridiculous scenarios for us to stumble into and, subsequently, start their paper trail of written warnings to justify our inevitable terminations.  Sorry, but when you fire a girl for being 10 minutes late because she's 7-and-a-half months pregnant and had to rush to the ob/gyn for something (but was still professional enough to call all her advisers, aka her REAL bosses to let them know--none of whom had any issue with this, for the record), then you're just operating at a whole new level of lowliness.  I could go on, but you get the idea.  This is a dead-end job with no potential for upward mobility (though they'll tell you otherwise with a straight face, which is laughable), so you're essentially stuck being, as one of my adviser's so eloquently put it on a semi-regular basis, a "glorified secretary" until you either get enough self esteem to look elsewhere or get axed because someone doesn't like you and they made it their business to get rid of you.

My eight year tenure at Ameriprise Financial was an enjoyable time from start to finish. In my current role, typical days were very high paced and interactive from various aspects of the business. I loved the idea of working with Ameriprise Financial's vast group of Experienced Advisor Recruits. It's always been a passion of mine to work directly with financial advisors in any capacity. I learned about types of loans, awards, and bonuses provided to respective advisors before joining Ameriprise.

By far, this was the most enjoyable part of my job. I decided to resign effective August 31, 2012, considering this current role was not a role that utilized all of my talents. After six months within this division, I found my skill set much bigger than the job itself and was very ready for change outside of Ameriprise. During the last two years of my tenure with Ameriprise, I felt as if present career options available within Ameriprise were not for me. This evaluation made the decision to move on quite easy.

There was always an elephant in the room for me while in this department which made for a very uncomfortable working environment. At times, I felt this stigma as if all eyes were on me. I'm a person of color from Houston, Texas and did not feel as if minorities were well represented within in this division of Ameriprise Financial. This fact is something that disturbed me more than anything on a daily basis. This is not to say the people I worked with held themselves in a higher regard, but I prefer departments with a healthy balance of racial diversity. Unfortunately, this preference did not exist in my current role.

-They pay for all your licenses
-It's a good place to learn and gain experience
(get your licenses, place trades, learn to interact with clients, learn about different products, and once you reach your growth potential go somewhere else)
-They recruit college students who are motivated and will take a low  paying Salary
-Most employees are in their low 20's
-They offer continuous training and designations and will refund you once you pass the tests
-It can get old fast as it's a call center
-There is a lot of competition and you are awarded for meeting goals through food mainly but they also offer monthly bonuses
-Its all about what you can do for me today and not what you did yesterday
-Pay is low for the amount of work you do and how much money you make for the company
-Turn over is high. People pass the tests and go somewhere else once they realize managements agenda (managers are in their mid 20's) and that they can go somewhere else for better pay and less work.
-The company has been around for over hundred years but the department (AAC) has been around less than 10, the company is constantly trying to figure out how they can improve. But in the end, the logistics is confusing as well as their compensation metrics.

Overall, the culture is the best. Young people who are team players. 
But the stress is very high for all levels. 

They have a 401k with match. Pension after 1 year. If you want a secure job with routine this is the place, but if you want to maximize your pay you can take these skills and go somewhere else.

So much room for advancement, theres not one person that will say something negative to you about this place. I have been here for over a year and have already learned so much about the financial industry and investing. They give you the tools you need to better yourself and become the best you can at your role. There's daily huddles with your team, monthly one on one meetings with your manager to update how you're doing, the collaboration on the teams is insane with how much you work with your coworkers to get the job done. Everyone here has a positive view on Amerirprise. You will never talk to someone at work and hear something negative about it. Theres no "ugh I hate this place" or "I can't wait to leave". It'a all smiles and "good morning"s and "how are you"s. Everyone holds the door open for each other like omg whattttt... The atmosphere is amazing! You have opportunities to change company policies, rules, etc to better them. You have so much freedom to succeed and there is no micro managing. It's honestly the best place I've ever worked. ALSO!!! If you have no experience in the financial industry, its okay! Ameriprise teaches you everything you need to know to succeed in your role and don't mind candidates with no history in this field. I didn't even know what a stock or bond was going into my interview, I just told them how much I genuinely want to help people and make a change and they loved me.

I took an unpaid internship with Ameriprise Financial during my last semester in college. Of course, no one informed me that my internship should correlate with my majors.

I started with an Accounting major in school but quickly transferred away from the major after receiving a 'C' in one of my classes. I was fearful I would ruin my GPA and current Deans List standing. Towards the end of my time in college, I started second guessing myself and wanted to give the Financial Industry another opportunity.

The internship with Ameriprise was more of a learning experience. I was schooled on stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and insurance. Everyday included at least one hour with one of the Financial Advisors learning about retirement, investment, savings, etc. and the rest of my day consisted of administrative/clerical tasks. I put together numerous client portfolios, updated client's account, scanned, copied, faxed, and sometimes even covered the phone up front while the receptionist was out.

Towards the end of my internship, I was allowed to come on luncheons and participate in client meetings. I received a bonus of $500.00 for my achievements and a fair share of references/recommendations. However, it became apparent that the key to becoming successful is building your own client base to start off with. Unfortunately, none of my family and friends were seeking insurance or investments so it seemed like a path I wasn't destined to take.

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