The opportunities for learning at APPRISE have been plentiful. If you want to build your career in energy policy, this is probably the best place to learn and grow. In addition to the high degree of responsibility, the ability to work on real projects, and the training budget provided by APPRISE, you have a high degree of access to motivated, serious, and caring professionals who have worked in this field for 30 years. When you start, you might received most of your feedback from someone who started at APPRISE a year or so before you. But once you are up to speed, you will speak to, and learn from, the upper management on a daily basis. They will review your work. They will give you feedback. This is an opportunity most people do not get until they have been working in their field for 5-10 years. I got this feedback in my first 5-10 days! Socially, my colleagues and supervisors are all exceptional human beings. They are kind, welcoming, and wildly intelligent. I've learned from each of them and am very grateful for the friendships (not just relationships) I have developed. Working at APPRISE, you also get a generous training budget to take courses and attend conferences. These opportunities have allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of energy policy and survey methods - two field in which I work regularly. The culture is focused on learning, improving, and deepening our understanding of our projects and their contexts. I have learned a lot about specific policies and the policy space in general - my background was more quantitative than policy-oriented when I arrived, but I now feel more well-rounded. The methods and procedures currently used for analysis by APPRISE are very well thought out and there's always a reason for everything we do. That being said, everyone is happy to improve and find even better ways to complete our work - but you need to understand why we do it the way we do it first. RESPONSE TO OTHER REVIEWS I was VERY weary of working here because of the previous reviews. I brought this up in my interview and decided to take the job anyway and I am so grateful for the experience I have had at APPRISE. I learned valuable lessons about how to be productive, how to be a better researcher/analyst, and what I want out of my work - not to mention all the technical and soft skills I developed. I want to share how my experience relates to the other reviews shared here. I did not work for APPRISE when these negative reviews were written, but I can say they don't line up with my experience. Disagreement #1 - the upper management is *toxic* Other descriptions were disrespectful, unforgiving, and uptight. I disagree with this assessment and I think this starts from a misunderstanding of where management is coming from and results in a vicious cycle from there. You WILL get feedback working at APPRISE and feedback is generally pretty direct. If you take this feedback as an attack on your soul, then you're going to hate working here. However, if you take the time to get to know the management, you will quickly realize no one is trying to hurt your feelings. ALL FEEDBACK GIVEN AT APPRISE IS INTENDED TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF THE WORK. Every time you think feedback is about you and who you are, it's not. Feedback is about the work you produced, not who you are as a person. We cannot compromise on the quality of our work. If we make mistakes, there are real consequences - we're not in college anymore. We can't make mistakes and we have instituted a system of checking each other's work and writing checks in our programs to ensure no mistakes are made. Sometimes feedback may be given in a direct and straightforward way, but, in my experience, it has NEVER been destructive. Sometimes, it can be helpful to go make the necessary changes/updates, complete the task, and then go talk to the appropriate manager about what you can learn or why there was a disagreement. They were always happy to happy to help me in this way and they care about their employees and their professional growth. As stated in other reviews, the work we do here is very important and rewarding. Because our work is so important, the management, and the rest of the team, feels a strong sense of responsibility the work is done correctly. I have worked at other policy centers where someone's feelings were more important than correctness - unsupported analyses were kept in the reports because it would hurt someone's feelings to disagree with them. If this is the workplace you want, it's probably best not to work at APPRISE (and you might not like working in policy or research very much overall). Disagreement #2 - There's no training and you are just expected to know what to do with very little guidance. This is a very strange conclusion when I was encouraged to ask MORE questions when I started at APPRISE. You can probably tell by how much I'm writing I like to talk a lot and I already ask a lot of questions. I was still told to ask MORE questions. I was also told that the easiest way most analysts could increase the quality of their work would be to ask more questions. Questions are highly encouraged - it's pretty simple. I will agree there is a bit of a sink-or-swim environment at APPRISE. However, this statement requires considerable clarification. Being able to work and learn independently is a valuable skill (not just at APPRISE). You are encouraged to do your best to figure out what to do on your own. However, your fellow analysts are happy to help you, you are encouraged to ask questions, and you need to makes sure you update your manager on any decisions you have made or need to make. Additionally, your managers ALWAYS have your back and they will not let you "sink" - they are very good "lifeguards" for the sake of the metaphor. It's okay to tell them you're unsure of your ability to do a task, but you're happy to try and learn. Sometimes, that means someone else will do that task instead. Most of the time they will have you try and help you with feedback and support along the way. Disagreement #3 - You can't make mistakes and there's no wiggle room. This is partially true - we (as in APPRISE) can't make mistakes. There are processes in place to double-, triple-, and sometime even quadruple-check our work. If you make too many mistakes, you will create problems for everyone else because they will need to identify your mistakes and they will need to tell you to fix them. However, there is wiggle room. It's not that it's okay to make mistakes; it's that you are encouraged to spend the time to check your work yourself before asking someone else to check it. This should be the "double-check" before another analyst performs a "triple-check" (and a supervisor will sometimes complete a "quadruple-check"). Yes, mistakes are something we go to great lengths to avoid, but you are given the opportunity to check your work yourself and others check your work for you as well. There is definitely a culture of checking your work, writing checks in your programs, being careful, and constantly striving to be better. Disagreement #4 - The culture is super uptight. This is something which can change pretty quickly, but I'm not sure how I would have learned funny details about my co-workers, such as their favorite type of bagel, if the workplace were so uptight. I go out to lunch with my colleagues regularly and sometimes senior management will come hang out in the office and talk about hang-gliding in upstate New York, which art museum to take my mother to when she comes to visit, and who the Super Bowl MVP was in 1974 (1973 season - it was Larry Csonka). We work hard, and some days are quieter than others, but uptight is not the word I would use. Again, based on what you know from my writing style, do you really think I would survive at APPRISE if the culture was super uptight? Disagreement #5 - You just use pre-packaged methodologies and there's no room for you to contribute. I agreed with this when I started working here. For a while, I thought my value above replacement was zero. I strongly disagree with this now. When I started, I had very little idea of what I was doing and did not have a strong enough contextual understanding to propose any educated changes to our methods. That didn't stop me from asking why we followed a certain method and these questions were encouraged and treated as a teaching moment. I had yet to learn the context of our work. After about 8 months of working at APPRISE, I felt I was able to contribute to analytical decisions, my thoughts and advice were taken very seriously, and I started to feel like my work mattered. In fact, there were times when the senior management would disagree with me, ask me why I held a different opinion, and then decided to use my method instead. There were times when I was asked to propose options for how to proceed on a project and provide a recommendation and rationale. This is the kind of responsibility and respect I received within 12 months of graduating with my degree (including a summer vacation) and usually takes years. However, this took time - time for me to learn what I was doing and time for me to build trust with my managers. Overall, if you can keep your perspective on what's important and they fact that everyone just wants the work to be high quality, you'll have a great time here.
