CDW Reviews

Pros

Constant perks - food - giveaways - shirts - etc.
Plenty of flexibility to attend local events and industry conferences.

Cons

Organizational structure sometimes separates groups that need to work more closely together.
Lack of expertise in important markets.
Flexible residency requirements can encourage too much travel.

Advice to Senior Management

Fill open positions faster!
Focus more on services.
Publish more blogs / whitepapers for public consumption.
Cooperate more with "the community" - user groups, events, etc.

Pros

Market leading technology provider; great coworkers; constantly growing; company reinvests heavily in training, development and support systems. Represents every leading technology vendor.

Cons

Aggressive growth goals not for everyone. Low entry salaries. Recruiting model does not favor sales people in mid career transition.

Advice to Senior Management

Trim the layers of management. Take more risks and not require every new idea to have a proven ROI before it gets resources.

Pros

CDW offers great work/life balance. They allow you to work from home a couple days per week, and they are certainly flexible if you need time off or short days to accommodate your personal life. The people are friendly and great to work with as well.

Cons

CDW has lost its "culture" that it was known for in the past. Ever since the company went private, they started taking little perks away, and with senior management changes, all of the excitement and energy seems to have dwindled. CDW also does not pay their employees commensurate with their experience or market value.

Advice to Senior Management

Try to make the company a fun place to work again, and pay your employees what they are worth.

Pros

vendor opprotunities, continually stimulated, knowledge endless

Cons

overwhelming products, prioritizing my day can be complicated, dealing with angry customers

Advice to Senior Management

respect your subordinates and provide realistic feedback with activity, take the time to actually get to know your team, better bonds creates more success for everyone

Pros

CDW offers a rewarding, challenging, and dynamic work environment with a good culture and better than average compensation package.

Cons

Tough to come up with too many. A motivated and driven individual can overcome any of the challenges or cons presented.

Pros

CDW has great benefits. I have friends who left that now realize this, after 7 years I will start to get 4 weeks off a year and it roles over so you can bank it.

Cons

You would think that you would have a basic understanding of technology to work for a company that sells computers. Sadly many account managers do not.

Advice to Senior Management

Middle management make this place work. My best advice it to shave a little off the top and go public again

Pros

Great place to learn the technology industry if this is the industry you want to have a career in.
Great first sales job if you want to stay inside.
Opportunity to make good money, some will make excellent money.
Manufacturers will treat you well, buy you lunches, fun events outside of work.

Cons

This is an inside job. By inside I mean a cubicle, all day. If you can't handle that, don't work here. There is some opportunity for "outside" positions, but it is limited and highly competitive to get.
Don't work at CDW if you don't want to be in the technology sales arena, if your confused about your life, go take a trip to europe or something if it will make you feel better. This is a place for young people who are interested in technology and making money.
The chances of getting rich here are much slimmer than it was 10 years ago.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep the dream of making money alive. I mean, alot of money... it is not worth spending a long career at CDW unless you have the strong possibility to make six figures and higher. And if you crush the BIG bucks dream, if you cap your best, your most talented will leave. I had a great run, this company made my career, I will never forget the dub.

Pros

Flexible time, not micro-managed, nice coworkers

Cons

No real appreciation for work done above and beyond - it's a lot of "what have you done for me lately?" Moral is low and management's response is "If you don't like it, go somewhere else."

Advice to Senior Management

Appreciate your coworkers. Pay them a living wage. Make them feel valued beyond the tag line in the emails that announce how well CDW is doing. All the goals we write and development plans we have to submit are completely ignored and just make it feel like a slap in the face when no one notices all the work you do. Even throwing your own parade to toot your own horn doesn't work.

Pros

Good Training, lots of people to go to. You have alot of Managers, many of the vendors are in house.

Cons

$12 hr/ give you no leads. 25,000 base that doesnt ever move.

Advice to Senior Management

They should pay their employees more

Pros

As a new college graduate, CDW was very good to me in regards to training and teaching me how to successfully work in the IT industry. After 2-3 years at CDW as an Account Manager I had become very marketable to other IT companies in the industry. (Manufacturers and competitors)

Cons

Staying past LOS 24 was a waste of my time.. (for the non-CDW folks, they measure their employees Length Of Service in MONTHS not years.. very telling).. CDW continuously decreases commissions by raising goals and/or trimming your account base by 20%.. They always give a good organizational reason for the changes but the net effect is always the same, less money in your pocket.. After 2-3 years I knew everything I needed to know to move to a competitor in the area that doesn't play games with compensation & accounts.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop playing games with Account Manager's goals and customer bases.. You are encouraging your best and brightest Account Managers to leave.. They will rebuild their success over and over again until they eventually realize they can get off the CDW treadmill and rebuild somewhere else.