Engineering Technician Co-op - Anonymous employee Advance Testing Co Inc Employee Review

Where do I begin... Housing is a joke. When I lived there in 2017 they had bought a house and just tried to stuff as many people in it as they possibly could. They constructed “door walls” as spacers between rooms. The hours are feast or famine. You either work like a slave or don’t work at all. By the end of the first month I was one of the only people left in my Co-op group. The hours and the work is some of the hardest I’d ever done. Working nights, driving up to 3 hours to job sites, walking 6-8 miles a day/night with a 50 pound gauge and always working weekends. The job doesn’t require a college degree at all and some of the people there are terrible to work with. Jim smith acts like he reinvented the wheel by paying interns and giving them housing. This may have been the case 20 years ago but now you’d be hard pressed to find and engineering internship that doesn’t. I went on 3 internships after this co-op all of which paid well and provided nice housing options. Advance Testings business model is to reel in naive college students that are desperate for professional experience and work them to the bone or wait till the quit. Management knows they can pay them less since there interns so they try and make most of their work force interns. At least 80% of the people that worked there were interns or recent college graduates. A lot of turnover to say the least. All in all it was a miserable experience and it actually affected my health. Without disclosing to much personal information I had to have surgery which on my back due to the work environment which lead me to be able to leave early.