CGI Group Reviews in Washington, DC Area

Pros

- outstanding work/life balance to the point that it's easily feasible to take up a part-time job, attend grad classes, spend time with kids, etc.
- easy to take off work when necessary
- unlimited sick days
- team comraderie
- knowledgeable middle-management
- marketable starting salary
- relaxed and engaging employees

Cons

- terrible training (often you are thrown to the wolves in a rather antiquated or faulty subsytem and your deliverable is within the day, and the technical training they have doesn't apply to your client)
- much desired Subject Matter Expert Framework
- promotion determination is vague
- learning levels off after around 5-7 months

Advice to Senior Management

- more socials, nothing 3 months in between
- more care and compensation of staff (keep the benefits marketable and competitive throughout an employees career life line, not just starting)
- make people want to work there (CGI has the right elements and management needs to make the most of it, encourage workers with challenging work and a set standard for promotions)
- develop client specific training

Pros

CGI provides lots of opportunity for diverse work assignments. They have a wide variety of projects and customers and are very open to moving employees around to different projects.

Cons

CGI does very little to encourage a work-life balance. They have caps on vacation and comp time, and ofter require very long periods of time where taking vacation and comp time are not possible. This almost certainly leads to lost benefits. There are no real policies or practices related to doing your job. While in some cases, this could lead to very efficient small groups, in most cases is leads to varying degrees of poor management which puts the burden for success on the lowest level employee who is unwilling to tolerate failure.

Advice to Senior Management

Management, please do one of two things: either appropriately compensate and reward the superstars that keep you projects running, or reduce the burden and improve middle management such that the superstars needn't be heroes.

Pros

young, learn alot and a good amount of vacation days. The enironment is fun and crossfunctional. There are also options to move across projects easily.

Cons

not much compensation and hard to move up. Managers don't listen to training requests and don't mind piling on work.

Advice to Senior Management

listen to employees more. have more reviews and make sure to progress employees careers by teaching them and having one on one time with them.

Pros

great work/life balance.
Growing Company.
Coworkers are bright and down to earth
Managers are very approachable
opportunities to fit into new roles

Cons

no career advancement what so ever. Because of the work life balance, management is too busy attending to their personal lives than worrying about your career.

Advice to Senior Management

look after your career driven employees . low annual increases with increased responsibility and same job title doesn't motivate people to work harder.

Pros

CGI allows for flexible work schedule with certain positions and the ability to telecommute - a beneift to many employees.

Cons

The bench policy is an issue with many employees.
Because of the business unit model, not all internal functions are adequately aligned.
Employees regularly work long hours.

Advice to Senior Management

A call for transparency...there's no cause to have employees try to read between the lines.

Pros

friendly people, decent salary, good benefits

Cons

some upper mgmt (Director and VP levels) are too full of themselves, and need to watch their language in front of others (very unprofessional)

Advice to Senior Management

there are plenty of great leaders at CGI... if you are in management and you're too harsh to your employees, look to the nicer ones to follow their example, it's not that difficult. Also, you should encourage the careers of others without fear of losing your own power/influence on the direction of projects.

Pros

Co-workers stick together to complete assignments when put in terrible positions by management.

Cons

CGI doesn't not invest or care about it's resources. No time is allocated for training or self improvement. Leadership constantly signs contracts that ties their employees hands and heroic work need to be performed to complete assignments. Employees are not rewarded for personal sacrifices.

Advice to Senior Management

Your resources are your most important assets start acting like you care about them.

Pros

The best thing about this company is the people. There are a lot of nice, smart and hardworking people working here. They aren't treated all that well by the company, but they put forth their best effort none-the-less.

Cons

CGI sets the standard for how cheap a company can be run. We hit all our profit and revenue goals last year and to celebrate they threw us a Holiday Party. It entailed cookies and soda in our 12601 building lobby at lunchtime. I'm serious. Talk to anyone who works at any of our competitors in the industry and compare their benefits and salaries with ours and you'll soon discover how much better they treat their staff. This company scrimps over every penny they spend and you can feel it in everything they do. If you need a binder, you run to Staples and buy it yourself because the requisition would have to go through layers of approvals otherwise. They'll bring in people to give us flu shots but then make us cough up the $20 to pay for them, even though they'll be billing our clients thousands for every staff member who avoids getting sick. Cost of living adjustments are disguised as annual raises and the only time they give a real raise is if someone critical to a project threatens to leave. Stuff like that. And it's not because of this recession. In CGI Federal we hit our growth and revenue goals despite the tough economy. And well before this recession this company was treating it's staff poorly. This company is cheap, cheap, CHEAP. If you need a job and don't have other options than this place is better than nothing. But if you have alternative offers from competitors, you can most likely do much better elsewhere.

Advice to Senior Management

We are always asked by our most senior managers (those at Corporate in Canada) to "sacrifice" for the common good. Benefits aren't competitive and are slowly being reduced, continuing education and training is virtually nonexistent, and every year they come up with new ways to nickle and dime the staff in order to add some extra money to the bottom line. We are running at a 95+% untilization which is virtually unheard of in the industry. All of us consultants are continually being asked to roll up our sleeves and sacrifice more for the good of the company. The problem is that this money that we're giving up for the "good of the company" = more wealth to the majority stakeholders (the founders). Please stop trying to get more and more rich at our expense. We all agree that we need to be competitive and we are, but you've gone way beyond that in your quest to squeeze every last dime from this turnip.
As for the management of CGI Federal, as a subsidiary of CGI, George Schlinder is actually doing a decent job. He's a company man through and through and toes the company line to a T, which means squeezing costs, overhead and the staff as tightly as Corporate directs him to do, but otherwise he's quite competent at running the business.

Pros

Very flexible with work life balance, and projects can be interesting; generally the people you work with are collegial

Cons

Minimal opportunities for advancement; projects are long, multi-year engagements and it can be difficult to switch roles or projects if an opportunity arises

Advice to Senior Management

Find a much better way to nurture talent beyond the 1-2 year post-undergraduate years; get leadership that is more visionary

Pros

- 40 hour work weeks
- Relatively flexible hours and leave policy
- Very flat structure; everyone is on a first name basis

Cons

- Raises are tiny regardless of how quickly you have been promoted
- Stress of working on client site (depends on project)
- No true reward structure for top performers

Advice to Senior Management

Link compensation directly to job duties and responsibility. Moving up to a significantly more challenging position should come with a corresponding raise. By basing compensation primarily on time in service rather than actual duties, you are rewarding low performing employees who never take on additional responsibility.