financial advisor

assistant vice president

senior analyst

client services associate

service consultant

LPL Financial

My first 3 months were great. They provide very extensive training (but there is way more to learn once training is done), the campus is beautiful and scenic, and there is a gym onsite (with classes provided), a Starbucks on site, a nurse , a game room with ping pong, and their cafeteria is really nice with lots of delicious food. BUT, when you work on the third floor it feels like you can’t get out. You only get a 30 minute lunch. Expected to be on the phone with advisors 95%-98% of the day (yes, I had to ask to go to the bathroom). They expect calls to only take a certain amount of time, however, not every call is simple and some do take longer. If you go over time, you usually get a message from the team dedicated to monitor call times in addition to your manager.  If someone calls with an issue that requires research, you have to apply for time off the phone to research the issue and call the person back. This is the same if you’re assigned to a special project, you will not be given time off the phone unless you ask. No matter how hard you work, you will never be praised, however, make one mistake or have 1 sick day and it comes up on your monthly review. Also, working with some of the internal reps, they are NASTY and you’d think someone on your playing field with the same goals would be nicer. Members on the same team are held to different standards, where as, if you give bad information, you will be corrected. But your teammates will give bad information, not be corrected, and then the client will call 5 different times and get 5 different answers. Depression and anxiety are at an all time high on the third floor. And you can’t advance until you’ve been there a year and that’s if the desired position you want is opened. As far as salary, over half the employees come from staffing agencies that fought for higher salaries so there will be people with less experience and doing a terrible job making 10k more than you at any given time. But I hear the rest the place is great to work for!

Pros
New 13-story building with lots of amenities; adjustable ergonomic desks, cafeteria serving good, healthy options, onsite gym and clinic, game room, Starbucks. Excellent work environment, flexible schedules (easy to take a long lunch, or come in late if you need to run an errand), good benefits, work/life balance. Smart, friendly, hard working people there, lots of great talent. Decent technology, could be better, but it's good enough. Good, central location.

Cons
Very political and cut-throat, the textbook definition of a good ol' boys club. Rampant outsourcing throughout the company to increase the bottom line, beholden to their shareholders and not the employees. They don't care about you; they just care how much money you can make them, and will stab you in the back to further their own careers.

Very poor communication throughout the company (lots of silos). The company is very reactionary, and seemed to always be in fire-fighting mode, and doesn't manage its expenses very well.

Pay was good at first, but meager merit increases (usually .40 to .60 per year), meant you fell behind market-rate relatively quickly. "Year-end" bonus isn't actually paid until mid-to-late March. 

The company is insanely top-heavy; there are tons of AVPs and VPs doing the job of a manager or a business analyst, and yet are not managing people (nor do they have management skills.) It almost seemed like half of the company was people who had AVP/VP/SVP/EVP as their title.

People are considered expendable; half of the software engineers and PMs were contractors that were kept for a year or longer, then suddenly let go at a moments notice when management decided they weren't needed anymore (lots of churn and burn.) Then later that year, management outsourced most of the IT Department, including the Help Desk, Desktop Support, Networking, and other infrastructure groups.

There is so much more than the above, and this is only scratching the surface.

● Work-life balance
This company is not sensitive or flexible with working parents who have difficulties and challenges during the school year and COVID.

● Pay & benefits
They have RTO, "Routine Time Off" for anyone in a manager or senior level, uo to 30 days annually. They have PTO for all other employees, which must be accrued and may be used for sick or planned time away. They offer 16 hours of Volunteer Time Off. They have bereavement leave up to 3 days for immediate family. The problem is that when you do take the time off all of your work and then some is waiting on you upon your return. It's not worth taking time off. You are expected to line up your own back-up while OOO. It's just not worth it.

● Job security and advancement
Every year they promise training but then there is always more work and not enough time or staff so training typically goes by the way side and more work!

● Management
There are some managers that are great at this organization. The manager I had picked favorites and made the work environment harder for anyone else who confronted her.

● Culture
They promote their DE&I culture through Employee Resource Groups. The problem is they don't give these groups large budgets to work with nor are they going in the direction of a Business Resource Groups. I think it's a missed opportunity as they should be more present in the community.

● Overall
This company is a great place for technology and finance careers. They do not have a great Service model and the service employees are overworked and underpaid. The HR team is unlike any I've ever seen. They advocate for management and employees' voices are not as "loud." They tend to give more work than can be accomplished in an 8 hour day. If you enjoy work more than your personal life, this is the place for you! There's not much balance, otherwise. Too many chiefs and not enough indians. Great benefits though!

This is an hourly job, and no overtime is allowed. An admin consultant supports between 5 to 10 advisor offices, depending on the plans the offices have purchased. The assigned workload far exceeds what can be completed within an 8-hour workday or a 40 hour work-week.  New admins are undertrained and left to manage on their own.  Many admins got burnt out and left.


You won't have time to meet and be present with your team members. You'll know very little about them.  You won't know who's who in the business unit.


You won't be able to support other team members like covering their work while they're out or when one or multiple technologies that we use fail work, or show the new admins how to do things.  They won't have time to effectively help you either while you're out.  If you take vacation, by agreement between the advisor offices and this LPL business unit, the advisor offices will have to do with out you until you're back except for critical matters. So plenty of work wait for you when you come back.


You won't have time skill development, including those that would benefit the core clients which are the advisors. You won't  have time to learn the tools that each advisor office uses. 


You'll fail to meet SLA due to excessive work load, and that will be counted against you.


The advisors will "fire" you because you weren't properly trained and weren't given enough time to learn, and that will be counted against you.


It's very likely that you'll be given more offices to support more than some of your team members, if your manager decide to play favorite, because there's no transparency of which admins are assigned with which offices. 


Like many companies there is great potential, and like many other organizations this company struggles to effectively invest in their employees. You absolutely can grow here, and there are absolutely people here who have put in 10+ years with no signs of wanting to leave (and some of them aren't even in management). 
Leadership quality varies widely across teams and management levels, as is to be expected. Your mileage will vary. While I was extremely fortunate to have had a manager that was willing to take bets on me, leading to 2019 being a great year for me, plenty of my peers who were no less deserving were regarded with an unwarranted lack of trust from their respective management teams. Middle management seems to be undergoing drastic changes, with even AVPs being discarded without warning, leaving their direct reports in the lurch. Warring schools of thought regarding metrics within management resulting in employees being blamed for what are clearly management errors, with no departments being immune. And a lot of talent on the bottom rungs not being fairly recognized.

None of this is to say that I didn't enjoy my time there. I grew as a professional and person, built with and mentored others, changed lives and have countless good memories. I don't regret my time there and would change very little about it. I can't say you aren't gambling with your career by joining LPL Financial, but give them a try anyway. I ultimately enjoyed my time there and I believe there's a good chance that you will too.

I would like to be able to say nice things about LPL. However, experience there was worst ever. May be due to the technology dept I worked in and that manager, than overall LPL where I met nice people.

My second day there I was told that 2 people right before me had quit the position I was just hired for; I did also shortly thereafter. Wish I had knew that before I started and would have accepted one of the several job offers I had. Two other people that worked with that dept had quit just the month before. It was a small department. Highest turnover!

Fact: I was told to lie and cover up for major mistakes that affected successful implementation of project I inherited at the end of the project from my manager for key external customer. The reason there was a problem was due to management, lack of communication, lack of best practices for technology process.

Rather than fix the problems quickly and make client happy, manager wanted to pretend solution was OK when it was glaringly obvious that the project that was worked on for 6 months before I arrived was not what the customer wanted. The customer was furious. And it was a relatively simple project!

It is likely that people quit due to lack of integrity and poor treatment by this particular manager.

My manager was very nice in front of other people; negative, harsh, bordering on psycho behind closed doors. People usually quit a manager not a company. This manager needs some serious training in ethics, integrity, working with people effectively.

I noticed as soon as I got the job, a lot of senior leadership was leaving. Our department was put under three different business units within a year, which spelled out to me chaos and disorder within upper management. I had a very unclear career path and zero leadership, personally. The CEO was fired this week by the Board for misconduct with no severance package and only a "portion" of his vestments. What more is there to say. Their "Be Great From Anywhere" mantra regarding remote work during COVID is now "you're coming back to work mandatorily twice a week if you live within 50 miles of an HQ and anyone SVP or above has to move near an HQ if you want to keep your job."  Total hypocrisy. It's all about the bottom-black-and-white-ledger-line here, although my coworkers were all very smart, wonderful people and I miss working with them. I just felt like I was always pushing for more...be better, think harder, go an extra inch to just do the smallest thing to help the brand look more professional externally. No one else seemed to care. I worked at least 9 hours a day, if not 11 or more, to do my best and try my hardest and most people checked out at the standard 5:30pm and that was it. My merit increase was insulting and laughable and that made me bitter and resentful which is when my attitude went completely downhill. I took a step back in my career for this role thinking I'd have a better work/life balance and it was no better than my job before where I was making $40K more a year and was way more respected within the organization. It's an aimlessly led, dysfunctional, non-human organization. All about the $$$$.

I took a role at LPL as a service center representative. At first I loved it. The training was great. Benefits were meh (we did not have enough info on them, be careful bc HSA has a high deductible)... and the position itself wasn’t bad. Then I met my manager. It’s bad enough that you’re on phones 99% of the day, but you also have to answer for your whereabouts (like going to the bathroom or faxing someone a document). You’re expected to log all your calls in detail and be back on the phone once your call ended in 1 1/2-2 minutes. Also if there’s a complicated issue, you’re to write it up and then find time or apply for time to work on it. If you’re off the phone longer than that you will receive instant messages about why you’re in wrap so long.  Seriously, management is on your back. They also assign roles to non. Managment team members that put them in charge of their peers without telling anyone else. POOR COMMUNICATION SKILLS. And most of the phone calls were angry financial advisors who yell at you and call you names. If you have amazing stats, management doesn’t care, they will only tell you what you do wrong. They never offer praise. And play favoritism. AND if you’re hired through a staffing agency they will likely negotiate upwards of 45k for you, if you’re not, you will be met with resistance negotiating and likely only get 38-39. 
The yearly raises and bonuses are a joke. And there’s an on-site game room to relieve stress but you never get time to use it. RUN.

As a seasoned DevOps engineer, my experience with LPL Financial has been exceptionally positive, particularly in terms of their technological infrastructure and approach to software development. The company's robust adoption of cloud computing significantly enhances their operational scalability and resilience, a critical factor in the dynamic financial sector.

LPL Financial's implementation of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines exemplifies their commitment to efficiency and rapid deployment. This streamlined process not only accelerates the development cycle but also ensures timely updates and feature rollouts, aligning perfectly with the ever-evolving needs of the financial market.

What truly sets LPL Financial apart is their stringent focus on cybersecurity and compliance. In an industry where data security is paramount, their adherence to strict security protocols and compliance standards such as GDPR and SOC 2 fosters a strong sense of trust and reliability.

Furthermore, the company's collaborative culture, especially within its DevOps teams, is commendable. The teams' openness to new technologies and methodologies drives continuous improvement and innovation. This progressive mindset is vital in maintaining a competitive edge in the technology-driven landscape of financial services.

In summary, LPL Financial stands out for its advanced technological practices, secure and efficient operations, and a forward-thinking approach in the realm of financial services.

Responsible for translating high level corporate direction into specific vision for projects and individual tools.  Performed proof of concept testing, designed, implemented, administered and supported entire tools including monitoring suites and self-provisioning private cloud.  Created initial standards and proceedures for in-place and newly deployed suites and tools.  Lead training and created internal information loop with internal departments to improve new and in-place tools.
	•	Architected, test, deployed, administered and support the SolarWinds suite, including Network Performance Manager, Server and Application Monitor, Network Configuration Manager, Virtualization Manager, User Device tracker, NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, IP Address Manager and Web Performance Monitor.
•	Architected, tested and deployed self-provisioning private cloud using the vCloud suite including vCloud Automation Center, vCenter orchestrator, vCloud Director, vCloud Network and Security and vCenter Operations Manager-
•	Architected, tested, deployed, administered and supported the Microsoft System Center suite, including Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and Orchestrator.
•	Deployed HP Business Availability Center suite including Site Scope, uCMDB, Business Process Manager, Network Node Manager, Operations Manager and Real User Manager.
•	Integrated HP monitoring application suite with Operations Manager as a central event message browser
•	Monitoring team lead identifying project priority and mentoring junior team members

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Financial advisor 4 salaries reported	$57,750 per year
Assistant vice president 22 salaries reported	$134,214 per year
Senior analyst 6 salaries reported	$94,833 per year
Client services associate 3 salaries reported	$29.69 per hour
Service consultant 66 salaries reported	$28.05 per hour

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