Fidelity Investments Reviews in Dallas-Fort Worth, TX Area

Pros

Great health, 401k, and profit sharing benefits. The majority of middle management care about the employees. Good work/live balance.

Cons

Compensation is very low. The only way to get a higher salary is to move around a lot, or leave and come back.

Advice to Senior Management

If you want talented people to stay in their current jobs there need to be incentives to stay and a way to increase your salary while staying in the same job.

Pros

Family atmosphere where leadership goes out of its way to make lower level employees feel needed and appreciated. Smart employees from the bottom up in my division. Benefits are industry standard, can't be beat. Work environment is pretty good and facilities are outstanding.

Cons

Like many lower level positions in financial services, base pay isn't much to write home about and advancement can be slow. Even after a few promotions and raises, the base compensation isn't great. Fidelity is at the average for base comp, and tries to make it up in other ways, so this isn't too negative of a con.

Pros

Great training programs, friendly people are hired, good food, safe work environment, clean facilities, profit sharing even if you leave and come back to the firm, fair internal dispute resolution processes in place

Cons

large corporation which makes it difficult to advance, retail/representative work is all done on the phone with a strict clock in/out system.

Advice to Senior Management

Exemplary employees should be allotted more time to work with and mentor their peers (same position). Salary adjustment should be made due to distance of actual worksite. More bonus compensation. Less subjective employee reviews.

Pros

Excellent training and knowledge of the financial services industry with ample hands on experience. Career path opportunities within and outside fidelity.

Cons

Direct managers not as involved in your personal developement. To make a career for yourself and to take full advantage of the companies resources you have to do all the networking yourself. There are a ton of opportunities however.

Advice to Senior Management

Enhance the career development path that the managers should use for their representatives.

Pros

Promotion Growth
Great benefits
Tuition Reimbursement
Profit Sharing Plan
Great work life balance
Career development
Professional and friendly co-workers
Professional development

Cons

Knowledge is so specialized its not very transferrable out side the company.
Compensation is below the norm

Advice to Senior Management

The firm as a whole has a great plan but there is a lot of overlap in each department.

Pros

Benefits
Work from home opportunity
Educational opportunities in house such as Series licenses, etc.

Cons

layoffs consistently, over worked staffed.
No free time to utilize the company tuition reimbursement plan, or continuing education classes.

Advice to Senior Management

More promotional opportunities within the company, as well as training for promotional opportunities.

Pros

Fidelity has an easy going atmosphere.

Cons

Movement between divisions is difficult.

Advice to Senior Management

Get to know your subordiniates.

Pros

On-site gym, great facilities, great benefits in terms of insurance and 401-K matching (7%). Ability to work on a flexible schedule and analysts are able to work very independently.

Cons

Low overall compensation. Little room for advancement except through putting your time in as an analyst. Very hard to transfer from back-office to either middle or front-office.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus not only on developing talent for the positions they are in but encourage middle management to evaluate their direct-reports for roles in other areas of the business. Otherwise you will end up with great talent exiting the firm to the competition.

Pros

Great benefits. If you work for the right manager and are smart and diligent you can make Fidelity work. You need to put your networking skills to work. Fidelity weathered the 2008 rather well considering others in the financial services sector. Fidelity puts a lot of stock in personal integrity and doing the right thing for the customer.

Cons

The company has grown a lot over the years and now is bureaucratic. It is hard to be heard and get improvement ideas through the system. There are many roles now that are high throughput and that can be hard on the people.

There is a lot of talk about investment in technology, but it does not seem to be focused on the right technology and there are decades old back-end systems that badly need some upgrading.

Advice to Senior Management

I wish the compensation models could be re-designed. There are so many TEAMS doing great work, but the compensation models reward individuals and in effect setup competition on the individual level instead of rewarding teamwork. The compensation model was designed for gun slinging mutual fund managers and not to promote teamwork.

Do some work to highlight some great work going on in the operations.

Pros

Benefits are great, great management support, great work environment, friendly co- workers, etc.

Cons

Strict but fair policies, wish it was more laid back environment, no off campus lunch, etc.

Advice to Senior Management

N/a