Good experience, but has its downsides - Implementation Consultant Fast Enterprises Employee Review

Thank you for your review. We are pleased to see that you enjoyed working with FASTies and exploring new places with the company. Regarding you comment on location, you are correct, employees do not have complete control over their work location. No more control than any consulting company does in selecting its clients. Our business is modernizing government agencies. The projects are massive undertakings that generally go through a competitive bidding process. We don’t control what agencies “go shopping” for a new system at any given time, and no “win” is ever guaranteed. It is important that candidates understand this when considering a position with FAST (or any consulting company) and we make every effort to explain this in our recruiting process. One of the benefits of our success in the industry has been the growth in our client base, and thus the number of locations we do work. This gives us more opportunities to match our Implementation Consultants to locations that appeal to them. Internally, we have implemented tools to give employees a means to communicate their preferences to our staffing coordinators, and a greater say in where their next adventure will be. Finally, it’s important for FASTies to understand that a location’s “attractiveness” is in the eye of the beholder at a given point in time. There are people who love California, New York City, North Dakota, Mississippi, Finland, Malaysia and there are people who don’t. Generally, who we look for are people who set aside preconceptions, and approach new people and places with an open mind and sense of adventure. Regarding you comment that “Work/Life balance could be better”: Leaders are often the ones who work not only the smartest, but also the hardest. FAST is the leader in this industry. We hope that FASTies are proud to be part of something special and unique, and that they recognize that their hard work helps keep us on this path. Someone for whom a 40-hr standard work week, and 100% predictability are the priority may not be a good match with FAST. That said, we recognize work/life balance is important to sustaining our success. One way to improve work/life balance is to increase the size of our team to help meet the growing demand for our products and services. To this end, FAST continues to recruit aggressively. However, it does take time to cultivate people and expertise. We want to ensure that in doing so, the quality of our work, our methodology, and our culture are preserved. As we continue through this period of growth, we do as much as we can to help employees balance their work/personal lives. For example, we communicate project schedules so employees can better plan “R&R” around project peak times. FAST works with project managers and supervisors to more evenly distribute workloads throughout the project life cycle. FAST has been conducting more “Project Management Sessions” at headquarters to give managers another forum where they can share ideas and experiences. FAST Partners are actively involved in balancing workloads across projects. Lastly, in response to your comment on “transferable skills”: For folks who only value technical skills like learning the latest coding language, FAST may not be the best fit. Our software is designed with a single goal: to provide functionally rich, on time and on budget implementations for our clients. We are not in business to be a stepping stone to other companies. We want to retain our staff and do everything we can to make FAST a place where people want to stay. That said, we believe FAST is fertile ground for learning skills that are useful in any career. Many of our clients comment on the “all-around” strength of FAST employees, in terms of both technical and business expertise. Skills such as, problem-solving, critical thinking, client and relationship management, business and technology consulting, project management, system architecture and technical design, coding are all “transferable skills”.