IHS Markit Reviews

For a company whose products literally are the knowledge and insight of its staff, IHS surprisingly treats its employees as expendable drags on the balance sheet, rather than assets. It pays lip service to what it calls "colleague engagement", with a lot of hype, regular surveys and committees, but in practice the company invests little in employee development, training, growth or retention. HR has defined "career paths" for certain business areas, but the company rarely allows employees to advance along the defined paths, with politics being the top criteria for promotion (if it happens at all -- there are a lot of long-timers at IHS, and often you'll find your own career progress blocked). Salary growth is meager, with annual increases in the 1-2% ballpark, contingent of course on stock price performance, which naturally you will have no control over. There is a glut of middle management jockeying for attention from senior execs, with varying and haphazard results that have more to do with politics than adherence to a broader strategy. The word “strategy” is abused often, most commonly by small-time tacticians trying to sound more important and thoughtful than they are. IHS is a serial acquirer. The vision is obvious and the potential enormous, but the company sucks at integrating acquisitions from a product management standpoint, and the main outcome of all these acquisitions is two rounds of layoffs and re-orgs a year, a bunch of independent products that don’t integrate, and teams left without any resources or leadership to improve. Many a plan to fix this is written. Few are executed. In general, working at IHS lately is a demoralizing experience. Since the management team isn’t changing a whole lot in the forthcoming merger with Markit, I wouldn’t expect much to change here either.