Ameritas Life Insurance Corp Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Ameritas Life Insurance Corp full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Co-workers, benefits, free parking and cafeteria on site.

Cons – There is a severe lack of training with little to no advancement opportunities. Management makes changes without thinking & fails to fix known issues. In most cases, management has become a joke. Some departments are overworked and some hardly work.

Advice to Senior Management – Listen to your employees. Analyze all changes before making them, and admit when you make bad changes.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Ameritas Life Insurance Corp as an intern for more than a year

Pros – Great environment. Home office has a cafeteria, gym and social media computers. They encourage exercising. Flexible scheduling.

Cons – Can't think of any cons. Always have been flexible with my schedule, encouraging and motivational.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Ameritas Life Insurance Corp full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Stable company, benefits on par with similar companies

Cons – lack of mentoring talent, communication with employees, training. software is behind industry standards.

Advice to Senior Management – Listen to your field force in regards to what they need and act on it. Just listening doesn't help. Do more to lessen the tension between your Lincoln and Cincinnati locations. Lastly, try to focus on your quality of customer service metrics. These are just as important as the volume of customer service.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Ameritas Life Insurance Corp full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Excellent upper management, and leadership. Great ideas from above, wonderful 401K, benefits are good. Depending what area you are in there is job security.

Cons – Everything is very reactionary, there is no thought into future strategy when it comes to the staffing model. Answer for everything is, "Hey we can throw those people on the phones." as the search through personnel dwindles. In the Group division salaries are low, when I was working there people were spit out as soon as the ever changing metrics were not being made. Nothing was ever looked at more than the numbers, an employee may find ways to solve the company thousands of dollars a year, but if the employee did not make the metric goals, they would start the path of verbal warning, then written warning, then probation, then "We wish them well on their future endeavors."

Advice to Senior Management – I think the company could be a great place to work, however, the senior leadership, the CEO and that level need to find a way to see what's going on without telegraphing to the middle management what they are doing. See exactly how the company runs, just not the reports they may get. There is a lot of clean up that needs to be done. A lot of corporate nepotism that has promoted those who cannot into positions where they fail. When they fail, it is better to start the blame game, then a committee on the failure.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Ameritas Life Insurance Corp full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – Ameritas rarely changes and rarely lays off employees. It's nearly impossible to be fired...just show up and do your work each day. They like mindless automatons while talking about being "on a mission."

Benefits package is good. They make a good contribution to health insurance, although that is scheduled to change come 2014.

Cons – The biggest downsides are weak/obsolescent IT systems and low salaries. Once upon a time, the IT systems were state of the art, but that was about 30 years ago. The firewall won't let you check many websites you need to do your work, and any new technologies such as corporate social media are unreachable and restricted.

On the salary side, the corporate philosophy is to keep salaries at just below the median for a given market, and once you cross median, the formula is set to limit your annual increases. It's a typical get everyone to a "C" grade on performance plans so that all salary increases can average to 3%.

Advice to Senior Management – Be honest with employees: an annual report with actual audited data and notes from our auditors would go a long way to presenting an honest financial picture. Plus, if you want ideas, please respond to them in a meaningful way. Soliciting ideas currently means that they should cost nothing to implement, require no IT resources, and make plenty of profit immediately.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Ameritas Life Insurance Corp

Pros – Good people to work with and culture supported a realistic work life balance.

Cons – Management was indecisive and are slow to react or build consensus. The middle management team suffered from conservative, slow moving status quo the industry has fostered for so long. Regulatory requirements and filters were a barrier for getting things done in a timely fashion.

Advice to Senior Management – Management's job is not just to sit back and instruct their team members to negotiate the difficulties in resourcing and time management. They should teach by example, demonstrating their skills through effective negotiations with peer management teams.

Current Employee – been working at Ameritas Life Insurance Corp

Pros – CEO is very friendly and an open communicator - the communication is very good for a large organization.They have an incredible customer service commitment. Ameritas is a very ethical company. They care about employees and their families. Good work/life balance. Good opportunities to stretch beyond your pay grade (no extra compensation though.) Fun work-life opportunities. Reasonable workloads.

Cons – Positivity is so commonplace (sometimes fake) and the longevity of the employees causes them to be blind to what is really happening in the marketplace. No strategy. Unfortunately this is especially true for executive leadership at the division level. You can be stuck in the same position for a very long time with little career growth. As a company that has always been extremely profitable, they have no idea how to tightly manage their costs during a difficult economy. There is a lack of strategic vision as well as a lack of consistency in how work is performed. No cross training and no career planning. Their commitment to employees causes them to hang on too long to "dead wood". Ancient IT systems with little regard for the productivity of employees. The IT department is friendly, but they have few resources and the management does not view money invested into IT as something important. You might feel like you stepped backward into a time machine with the technology. Minimal opportunities to increase your pay, even with a promotion. Promotions are based on how well you are liked rather than performance.

Advice to Senior Management – Get rid of employees that warm a chair. Give employees more opportunities to grow within the organization. Reward performers. Bring salaries to market rates.Take a hard look at the leadership. Many of the leaders have a poor strategic plan and are so out of touch with the marketplace, they may sink the company.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Ameritas Life Insurance Corp

Pros – Flexibility, product innovation, not too big, access to upper management, good support, good leadership, strong back-office, family life very important

Cons – I really don't feel that there are that many negatives with Ameritas. Advancement is limited and being a specialty carrier limits opportunities.

Advice to Senior Management – Maybe try to balance the bottom line profits with the need for salespeople to enjoy some top line growth. Just need to be a little more agressive with new sales.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Ameritas Life Insurance Corp full-time for less than a year

Pros – The 401k wasn't bad. they would give you money even if you didn't contribute.

Cons – The company is based in Nebraska, so if you enjoy mom jeans, 80's hair, and a lack of general pleasentries, then this is the place for you!
They really do treat people like parts of a machine not like people.
The organization structure is a mess and there is so much blame game stuff going on that it is a wonder that anyone could ever get any work done.
To top it off, if you tell someone something can't be done, they think that yelling at you and threatening your job will get it done. Well, you can fire all the people you want, but that won't make something that can't be done happen.

Advice to Senior Management – Before you destroy a profit making institution, wait a year. You may find a cash cow that you didn't even have to mess with.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend