CGI Group Reviews in Mississauga, ON (Canada)

Pros

- good exposure to a IT projects
- good learning opportunities
- average benefits

Cons

- no support from management
- no clear direction and strategy from management
- no pension plan

Advice to Senior Management

- listen to your people

Pros

Stable and not very demanding

Cons

Stable and not very demanding. Yes the same thing can both depending on how you look at it.

Advice to Senior Management

There needs to be a more effective way to foster and reward excellence and discourage mediocrity. Senior management needs to lead the way in establishing a common framework for sharing information, resources, knowledge and practices across all the various and very disparate divisions of the company.

Pros

I deal with many clients on multiple platforms. This gives me good exposure to a large section of the industry. The share purchase plan is alright but they only match you 2% which isn't much seeing as there's no pension.

Cons

They advertise "PROFIT SHARING" but they never share the profit. Every year they find a new way to alienate my business unit and after announcing millions upon millions in profits we never get a share of it come profit sharing time. There's NO PENSION which makes you even more mad when they swindle you out of profit sharing. The senior management clearly favour the Montreal business unit, as it's based out of Montreal.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your underlings.

Pros

The management has no clue what you are doing most of the time.

Cons

Everything. Senior management is incompetent on a good day. Simply put, this place is a sweat shop and the employees get no respect or recognition. Long hours are expected, with no recognition or reward. Incompetence breads promotion. The company works on a profit sharing perspective where the profitability of your business unit drives the bonuses (if any) of the unit, as such, business units do not work together, in fact, they compete against each other. This place is as backwards as company can be.

Through into that they are a disaster in finance and administration. Expense reports are micro managed and frequently mis-placed and/or lost. Continual errors in payrol processing. They cannot produce reports on profitability of clients.

It is a wonder that they can figure out a financial report for the stock holders.

Advice to Senior Management

Get in tune with what the markets are demanding and realize that your company is the people that work for it.

Pros

There are many technical opportunities for growth especially if you are bilingual and speak French. There is a genuine lack of experienced resources and many opportunities for employment in many technical fields. If you want to move to other offices globally, you can easily make the connections and potentially move elsewhere (at your own expense).

Cons

Key decision makers and and the management approach is all based on the Montreal head-office perspective. Management in Montreal seems to have little time for trying to understand how the people and teams function in the Toronto area and expect treatment of clients and the way things get done to be the same.
The management layer demands you be politically savy and develop tight relationships with the Montreal management.

Advice to Senior Management

Success in the GTA will NOT come from duplicating the way things are done in Montreal. Take the time to better understand how Toronto gets things done and see if you can allow some flexibility in the "Montreal" approach to better service the GTA clients.