Project Administrator | Malvern, PA | Jan 22, 2013
Vanguard’s core investing business is top notch; otherwise, it is a highly fragmented organization.
A corporate culture of mentoring, volunteerism, charity, and responsibility. A good work/life balance, flexible time, telecommuting, reasonable compensation, and advancement opportunities are all available, but are highly dependent on the department and/or manager. My time at Vanguard spanned all three of the CEOs. The company has changed (and continues to change) from an idealistic, iconoclastic company to a much more mainstream, growth-oriented American corporation. You will succeed and be very happy at Vanguard if: You buy into the culture, you’re politically adept (and politically correct), you get satisfaction from tooting your own horn, and you believe that process trumps product. Cross-departmental / cross-divisional projects often felt adversarial. Lots of little fiefdoms protecting turf rather than collaborating for the good of the company as a whole. Very bureaucratic. Management’s general avoidance about taking ownership and actually addressing the issues. Best to push things onto subordinates (the lower the better) without clear expectations or the appropriate resources and maintain plausible deniability. Little evidence of a cohesive (company-wide), long-term strategy or vision. A strong focus on fixing the small immediate problem in a way that frequently results in more work / re-work later as well as squandered resources. The recent changes to compensation and profit-sharing reward job performance over tenure. While these changes may have been necessary, they h
Prosa stable, respected, conservative company that offers job security, excellent 401k match, very good retirement plan, good benefits, and employee services.
Consit never felt like vanguard was a single company.
Vanguard is a great place to get your licenses for free, but besides that this job is utterly miserable. Incompetent managers, extreme micromanagement, you will be expected to be on the phone 100 percent of your day besides lunch and are tracked by the second. One break and you will hear about it, often in front of your whole team. They literally do not care about the quality of your actual work, only that you hit your metrics and speak to as many clients as possible to compensate for severe understaffing. You hang up the phone and it immediately starts ringing again before you can even take a breath. The calls are relentless, and most of the time the client on the line has been on hold for an hour prior, so obviously they will be angry and take it out on you. There’s nothing you can do about it, you have to sit back and take it while these clueless “investors” scream and complain about things that are out of your control. This is all day, every day, for 8 hours. Total mindless and soul crushing work that will leave you feeling burned out quick. My hours are 9:30 - 6:30 which has negatively affected my mental health to the point where the only thing I feel throughout my day is sheer hopelessness. They drag out the duration of the phone roles and delay the promotion process as long as they can, using “subdivisions” disguised as actual promotions to give their staff a glimmer of optimism. Managers are corporate robots that regurgitate useless “support” and advice that has liter
ProsPTO
ConsLaughably underpaid and overworked, awful management, too focused on numbers and not focused enough on quality of work, long and brutal hours
typical day at work revolved around working a schedule where you would have time allocated throughout the day to work with clients as well as the other time would be to work with clerical and monetary transactions.
I learned a lot about IRAs, Trusts and Individual accounts as well as the rules and regulations for them. I also learned a lot about mutual funds, ETFs and various money market accounts, including Brokerage accounts too.
Management, is something that needed much help in this particular department, I feel that it was a cookie cutter approach used in my department and from an employee perspective who is managed, I think that good managers should use different managing styles for different people due to the fact that everyone isn't the same and various approaches should be used when working with your team.
Co-workers, it is a typical call center type of environment, but mostly due to the nature of the business we are in everyone is professional and most are easy to get along with and are a pleasure to come in contact everyday. Now on the other side of that coin there are a few sour ones that are constantly miserable and no matter what is said they are always on the opposite spectrum of everyone else, but it isn't enough to make the department terrible to work in.
Hardest part of my job, Salary, Salary Salary..Also it would make the employees a lot more engaged if our department was paid what the average industry is paid for what it is we do. Our department
Investment leader, highly touted in the industry. Competitive interview process. Once you get in, great support in ongoing education, Series licensing, etc. Phone roles are a bit challenging, they throw you on with minimal training and it's really drinking from a firehose. Seems to be a divide forming as they are doing more external hiring to manage these client-facing roles than promoting from within.
Company has been focused on growth, and it's led to burnout across client facing roles. The responsibility levels that were delivered to us as "exceptional times" and to "grit our teeth through this rough patch" at the start of COVID have now turned into the normal service level, and people are noticing (and leaving). Management seems content with growing the company at the expense of current staff's workload and work-life balance.
Technology is HORRIBLE, laughable in some regards. All of it. Internal trading systems, client communication systems, the Vanguard website, it's consistently crashing and creating a headache for clients, advisors, support staff, etc. It's become a running joke when the next thing will crash. Frustrating since it torpedoes your ability to perform work for the day, making tomorrow's work doubled, so on so on.
Pay is noticeably lacking (we all knew this), but the benefits that supposedly make up for it have slowly been dwindling as well. Recent cuts to the retirement medical benefits, HSA perks, etc. have not gone unnoticed. With that, the company g
ProsBenefits, ongoing development/support, fiduciary, industry leader, job security
ConsWorkload, work/life balance, salary, technology, management communication
Good health benefits and 401k “handcuffs”. Wayyyy too focused on KPI’s in phone based roles
I worked at vanguard for just under 5 years. It was my first job out of college and I was excited to go work for a fund with a good ethical background of low cost mutual funds right out of school.
Pros: good health benefits, HSA, and 401k match(once vested, most people don’t get the 4% match until 1 yr of service and aren’t fully vested on the additional 10% employer contribution for 6 years). Great coworkers and people who generally want to do the right thing for the client.
Cons:
Really poor phone training and call routing practices. As the years went buy the phone brokers became more and more silo’d and had increased pressure from management to lower call times, which was always at the expense of providing a poor experience to our clients. Unless you are an external higher, pay is non-negotiable. Standard merit increases each year don’t keep up with inflation. (Standard 3% for most employees, with someone doing an above and beyond job receiving a MAX of 5-7%).
This leads to ultimately people having to “ grind the corporate ladder with typically a pay increase of 7% at each level for lower tier colleagues and up to 15% for specialists/managers.
The funds as a whole are run by a competent group of portfolio managers but sometimes it feels like traders or research analysts are given roles to fill a “quota” instead of hiring the most competent employee for that job.
After learning about how the funds are run in regards to how conservative they are on securities lending,
ProsGood 401k match, we’ll intentioned coworkers, ability to network
ConsHealthcare could be better, mgmt metrics ruining the legacy customer service focused mindset. Incompetent senior leaders, that never get to know the people or processes they oversee
1.0
Customer Service Representative | Scottsdale, AZ | Sep 18, 2018
Don't Be Fooled
I found Vanguard to be a bit of a 'wolf in sheep's clothing'.
It seemed like a reasonable place for someone my age. No pressure to get licensed if you have no interest (That has changed). Great benefits and supposedly, pay raises.
To start with the positive: If you can remain on the payroll there is a bonus earned in the calendar year, but not paid until June of the following year. However, although you may have 'earned' the bonus if you are not on payroll on June 30th of the following year, you don't get the bonus.
The health insurance and other benefits are good.
The 401(K) is generous, BUT the vesting period is 6-years.
Good luck advancing anywhere if you don't get your license. It is very difficult to advance at Vanguard if you don't. It is also very difficult to get an interview for posted positions if your numbers aren't perfect. There is a sense of nepotism.
The metrics are typical of a call center, but not easy to meet consistently and if you don't meet them consistently you can be placed on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP).
Many requests for additional coaching and training went unanswered so, how can you improve your performance? Assimilation??
The initial training for what can be complicated financial tasks was inadequate and lacking in any real-time or hands-on experience. All follow-up training was lacking as well. No hand-outs, the trainers are not actual trainers, just co-workers and a.limited time allotted to training because everyone mu
Vanguard is a great company. They truly care about clients and the community. Employees get a volunteer paid day off and have many opportunities to volunteer for the United Way and Vanguard. Additionally, the benefits package is competitive with health care, life insurance, and a 4% 401k match starting in your second year. You get about 18 paid days off to start too, but you're going to need them. You can also buy a week of PTO and almost every one does. The people I work with are amazing. There is a good mix of young and old but my department particularly has a lot of fresh-out-of college blood.
The company extensively trains its employees and encourages us to help clients. Metrics are unrealistic, though, and creativity is not a big part of the day-to-day life of an investment professional. It may be if you are in IT (and the IT department definitely needs people as the systems have been crashing a lot lately). You are trained to offer as much as possible but are given an a goal to speak between 400 and 500 seconds to each client on average. I like to talk to people and helping a 90 year old log online and place a trade on their own does not take 400-500 seconds.
I work 4 days a week with having a three-day weekend one week and getting two week days off the next week. This is going away for brokers in the next few quarters. 10 hours sitting in a grey cube with a constant beep is not what I wanted to do when I was 12. I have attempted to move up but the company moves q
Most all Vanguard employees start on the phones, and you are advertised 1 year on the phone before jumping into a different role. You're just expected to do the job everyone hates before you can do anything else. I've now been in the role 4 years because I've either been passed on by people in departments that are more respected within the organization, or the roles that are posted are restricted to those who are already within the department you are trying to go to.
The management within my department set strict metrics, which isn't necessarily a problem, but they hardly provide the tools to help us succeed. The department is plagued by technical failures and then enforcing malicious compliance double standards (clock in here, use break time here, etc.). For instance, if you are stuck on a call which goes into a scheduled break (which lunch is often shortened because they can't forecast accurately) you can still take the allotted time but because it's now out of the time that was scheduled for you, your metrics are impacted by it and you have to either take an even shorter lunch or just the loss to your other metrics. You can expect to hear from management their constant gratitude for "Your continued flexibility and dedication" which never sounds as genuine as they might mean it when they're idea of giving back is to give the regularly scheduled lunch time back.
I've worked here for 4 years and I've only just now made it to a point where I feel like I'm being paid a fair e
• Systems monitoring and administration of Servers for day-to-day problems, patches, user administration, hardware failure, monitoring log files, backup, software up gradation, configuration changes and documentation.
• Installed Solstice Disk suite 4.2 & Administration of Solstice Application Products on SUN machines and implemented RAID 0, RAID 5 and mirrored the Root Disk for redundancy of the Operating System.
• Installation and Administration of Solaris 8, 9 and 10 and using Jump start server and Linux Operating System using kick start including performance monitoring, scaling and capacity planning and hardware maintenance of Sun fire servers.
• Using HP Service Manager tool for creating Change Requests.
• Web Site Hosting on Linux (Apache), NT (IIS)
• Experience on LPAR, DLPAR, HMC, Micro partitioning and VIO servers.
• Performance monitoring for Solaris/Linux workstations, servers, and peripherals.
• Planning, installing and configuration of operating system on new Sun Servers.
• Troubleshooting in house applications, 3rd party applications and supporting IT infrastructure.
• Providing day-to-day user administration like adding or deleting users, password aging.
• Document instances of system integration, design, modify architecture diagrams for all environments.
• Installation of Apache, Web logic and Tomcat Web servers.
• Creating SSL certificates for windows servers and Solaris/Linux Servers.
• Developed UNIX shell scripts using Korn, C Shell, Ba
Make no mistake, VG is the king. Put it this way, early-mid 2000s, they were just creeping up on the $1T AUM behind only Fidelity. Pay has never been close to adequate here, however back then they more than made up for it due to unmatchable benefits, security and incredibly bright colleagues surrounding you. Vanguard CLEANED HOUSE in terms of other companies when 2008 recession hit. They had always stuck to their guns of low cost etc, so ppl both individual and institutional flocked to get on board. By early 2013 they were approaching $2.5TRILLION!!! Yes. That is how much the wiped out other rip off firms. Good right? No. This is when this company sold out everything it ever stood for. You will be a phone rep. Period. By the time I quit (and the attrition was out of control and hear it still is ) Basically all they hire is know-nothing arrogant 22 yr old local U grads who lead the charge of incompetency that is simply rampant in that firm. The product itself, mutual funds, and most other products are absolutely the best in the biz. Customer should be happy. But internally it was no exaggeration the equivalent of working in an Indian call center with a mix of some completely brilliant, underpaid/utilized ppl, while other half were clueless twits..Made for bad mix and the management had continued to plummet..Moral: Invest there, don't work there. It's a joke
ProsEasiest 'finance' job available
Conszero career advancement, atrocious pay, VG will never sponsor FINRA/NASD unless they absolutely have to.
Questions And Answers about Vanguard
How often do you get a raise at Vanguard?
Asked Oct 27, 2020
Yearly
Answered Jan 9, 2023
Yearly
Answered Jan 2, 2023
What is the promotion process like at Vanguard?
Asked Jul 6, 2021
Nonexistent
Answered Dec 29, 2022
Apply for position after you reach time in job hope to get an interview
Answered Dec 16, 2022
What is the best part of working at Vanguard?
Asked Dec 17, 2019
Ability to move jobs
Answered Jun 29, 2022
Horrible
Answered Jun 22, 2022
What questions did they ask during your interview at Vanguard?
Asked Jul 9, 2016
They asked how were my customer service skills? They also could I do patrols They needed you to patrols of a whole building in a half hour. We had 6 buildings on our campus.
Answered Dec 16, 2022
Do you want to work here? Why do you want to work here? What if anything did you hear about Vanguard.
Answered Oct 11, 2022
If you were in charge, what would you do to make Vanguard a better place to work?
