CGI Group Reviews in Toronto, ON Area

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

Great People, flexible work environment, no micro-managing

Cons

Career paths, learning and development opportunities, not enough emphasis on growing internally

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on your employees and what their needs are - they are the most important part of the business so it is worth investing in them and keeping top talent here. CGI should strive to be a Top Employer by offering employees an engaging work environment where they can grow personally and professionally.

Pros

Recognizable name which can add credibility to your resume.

Cons

One of the worst run organization within the GTA; very political, very bureaucratic; 2 tier systems; senior management / leadership team have a sense of entitlement; elitism. Exe Leadership Team is disconnected from the employee population; not concerned with company moral, satisfaction or development. Only concerned with margins to achieve their targets for own personal bonus payout while the rest of the employee population doesn’t achieve bonus. Constant company realignment creates a very confusing org chart; CGI Montreal operates to a different set of operating guideline b/c they are French and in Montreal. HR offering are not unilateral; different offerings for different lob’s due to mergers and acquisitions. No sense of leadership at pretty much any level.

Advice to Senior Management

Start thinking progressively or outside the box; great companies are built by their people; so value and engage your people they take your organization to the next level; be a top employer instead of an organization where people go to when they want to ride out their last few years of their carrer before retirement.

Pros

Some good first level managers, who were open to alternative work arrangements.
Better compensation then other firms I worked at.

Cons

Executive hold out possibility of bonus if business unit meet profit margin, then sets unrealistic margin (is 13% after tax profit realistic in this economy?).
No work-at-home policy. (The technology enables it, as a technology firm CGI should be leading the way.)

Advice to Senior Management

Why is a billion dollar company still using excel spreadsheets to manage their P& L?
It's time CGI 'grew-up' and put the proper tools in place so that Senior Management can make properly informed business decisions.

Pros

Compensation is satisfactory at the company. There is decent opportunities for growth within the company. CGI Group is quite stable from an industry perspective and is fairly well respected.

Cons

CGI group is primarily known within Canada and not as well recognized in the United States and other countries.
CGI's bonus structure is not as good as other companies. It is based primarily on profit sharing, which does not provide as high bonuses, especially during hard economic times. For new grads, CGI does not provide a significant amount of training as some other companies.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior management should focus on investing more on its employees and providing more training opportunities .

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

1) Canadian multi-national with a large backlog ($15B) of contracts.
2)CGI stock has held up well during the 2008 economic meltdown.
3)The workforce is diverse and skilled.
4)The benefits are flexible

Cons

1)Staff works a lot of hours
2)Off hours social events need to be more inclusive and fun

Advice to Senior Management

High performance needs to be better compensated.

Pros

Nothing comes to mind. It used to be a good place to work a few years ago.

Cons

There are quite a few "orphaned Bell employees" now working in CGI-CSB. On one hand, you can't win the development work because CGI wants to extract as much $ from the client as possible. On the other hand, the client is restructuring and knows they are being taken to the cleaners. The end result is that the systems development professionals get caught in the middle. To top it all off, they are also now determined to offshore the development work to India wherever possible!

Advice to Senior Management

Quit being so greedy and be more willing to get your staff back to work.

Pros

scope of opportunity; some great people

Cons

short term view for revenue and costs; extremely risk averse

Advice to Senior Management

what has worked in the past may not be appropriate in the future; need to act like a global company not a federation of regional tribes

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.