RAND Reviews

Current Employee – been working at RAND

Pros – If you are looking for a great life balance, are too ambitious to work in academia (low pay), but are not that ambitious to work 70 hour weeks in the private sector, this is the place to be.

The work environment is really nice and the people are really bright, even though you're bound to encounter some weird scientist types who won't even say hello to you when you cross paths with them in the hallway. It's not a crazy competitive environment so people tend to be nice to each other overall.

The pay is very decent, and the benefits are great. 6 weeks of paid vacation/ sick leave + major holidays and paid emergency days.

Also a very prestigious place to work. 30 Nobel Laureates have worked at RAND at some point in their career.

Cons – The internal labor market: You have to find work within the company even after you are hired, which can be stressful at times. However, if you happen to do research in an area where there is a lot of demand, then you won't face that many problems in coverage.

Not that many opportunities for advancement: There are only three levels: associate, full and senior. Most people reach senior status after 7- 10 years with the company. If you are very ambitious and really looking for a place where you really want to advance in your career, then you'd rather work for a for-profit consulting company like McKinsey or Bain& Co. (but then be ready to put in the extra hours to advance there)

Overall the positives definitely outweigh the negatives for certain people.

Advice to Senior Management – As hard as it may be, it would be good to find income streams outside of the DoD. RAND people are really bright and could benefit a lot more clients in the civilian/ private sector.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at RAND

Pros – - Truly flexible work hours (you must bill 80 client hours every two weeks – when and where you do it is effectively optional).

- Enormous independence and intellectual responsibility for solid hires. I have gone days without being micromanaged.

- High quality office buildings in principal locations. Santa Monica office is an architectural marvel.

- Strong name recognition in nearly every other white collar field. For some lines of work a multiyear stint is as good as an Ivy League degree.

- Pay comparable to big box consultancies such as Accenture, Booz Allen, and Deloitte for similar experience (although not by way of educational credentials or quality of work demanded). The perks of a non-profit without the poverty.

- Six weeks of unrestricted, paid leave per year, in addition to standard holidays (see caveat below).

- Very minimal but classy travel (Ritz Carlton / business class upgrades).

Cons – - RAND has an internal labor market where one must bid onto projects based on semi-formal networking. This works fine so long as there are more man-hours of work to be done than man-hours available, but when things get lean it can get somewhat troublesome. Taking unexpected vacation days to fill in gaps in coverage is only made palatable by how much leave is given.

- There is little to no workforce planning beyond minimally useful end of fiscal year targets. Therefore, severe imbalances in workflow can occur within a given practice area, resulting to serious lulls in one’s ability to bill clients. For example, several principal investigators are having a deliverables reviewed at once to meet a DOD mandated submission deadline, and therefore cannot be bothered to issue new tasks to mid-level employees.

- Little room for intellectual movement. There are effectively three major lines of consulting work at RAND: traditional defense-industrial issues for the Pentagon (where RAND made its name), intelligence work which amounts to very high level augmentation for the CIA, NSA, etc., and health / labor / population issues. To the extent people move between these areas, it is only because say, the Army requests a medical study and it requires specific bureaucratic knowledge to come to fruition. The remainder of RAND research – in areas like infrastructure, the arts, development, policing, etc. – is very piecemeal and represents very low dollar flow.

- There is no mechanism to fire underperformers / nasty personalities that lack a fixed term contract. There are a handful of senior researchers in every office that are atrocious, but continue to cobble together enough coverage to meet their billable targets and hence hang on.

Advice to Senior Management – -
Restructure the travel support contract with incentives for cost control. If RAND staff can find hotels and tickets for more than 15% below the quoted rate from the support agency (the supposed amount reimbursed to RAND at the end of the fiscal year based on the organization’s aggregate bill), allow them to make the arrangements on their own. Example: I was forced to pay a “negotiated rate” of $200+ a night for a hotel in Santa Monica whose going rate was $89 plus tax by way of Google. Just because the travel contract fulfills government auditing requirements does not make it sound.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at RAND

Pros – Incredibly smart people, great infrastructure, stimulating work. Very collegial work environment. One of the best places I've worked.

Cons – None that really mattered very much.

Advice to Senior Management – Keep up the great work.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at RAND

Pros – Flexibility in working hours, telecommuting, interesting work, prestigious, high caliber of staff. Good benefits, excellent facilities, access to great lectures

Cons – if you don't have a PhD you are undervalued and underpaid. The RA position is a stepping stone (2 year max). If you want to get great experience before moving on with your education this is ideal.

Advice to Senior Management – Provide more opportunities for RAs to develop into Project Associates. The Project Associates should be better paid and have more opportunities to lead their own projects.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at RAND

Pros – Incredible collaborative staff coupled with excellent policy and government resources make RAND a great place to work. Well funded and financed, resources were always sufficient for project work. Terrific in-house technology and publishing departments.

Cons – Toxic work environment at times. Politics among supervisors and across internal departments contribute to often 'he said she said' scenarios. Difficult to cut through all the red tape.

Advice to Senior Management – A large organization that requires lots of stakeholder input for changes to occur; need to have checks in place for appeals to management's fairness.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at RAND

Pros – RAND is an outstanding work environment. For researchers, the access to information on an extraordinarily broad range of subject areas is probably without parallel. This is a place for people with a passion about public service. Because it's a non-profit, it's not for those who wish to enrich themselves financially. Benefits are crafted with care and compassion.

Cons – Because RAND is a non-profit organization, it is not for people looking for high salary opportunities. Management could reach down more often to researchers and other staff members.

Advice to Senior Management – Find ways to interact more informally with research and non-professional staff. The distance between management and staff often seems very large.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at RAND

Pros – The people and environment are top notch, you cannot beat the location!

I really loved my coworkers, the office location and how everyone got along there.

Cons – Salaried employee compensation is sub par with most of the payroll going to insanely high executive compensation.

There are a lot of "adjunct staff" there which are basically contract employees with no benefits, because Rand is too cheap and greedy.

I was privy to some of the salaries and was shocked when I saw that... I had people working under me without benefits because "it wasn't in the budget". I guess that was true since even the lowest level financial analyst was making a decent 6-figure salary.

Advice to Senior Management – Quit paying you executive staff these crazy salaries and work on lower level compensation packages.

Current Employee – been working at RAND

Pros – RAND is a non-profit organization, which is very similar to a university, without students. It has a slightly shady reputation, but that is undeserved (although it might have been deserved in the past). One gets involved in research which is cutting edge, and is surrounded by very bright very hard working individuals.

There is relatively generous paid vacation time, and in something that I think indicates what RAND think of their staff, vacation pay is higher (for researchers, not sure about others) than normal pay. That is, if you take all the vacation allocated to you, your pay will be about 5% higher than if you did not take any vacation.

Cons – Coverage. Finding 100% coverage (i.e. 100% of your salary) is the thing that all researchers finds stressful, and particularly stressful to start off with, and for your first year or two at RAND.

Advice to Senior Management – Listen to staff more.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at RAND

Pros – Prestige, brilliant and fun coworkers. Across the street from the beach. Santa Monica is way cool.

Cons – compensation compared with similar institutions seems a bit low. They have a graduate school? Strange.

Advice to Senior Management – continue to listen to employees, as you used to in the good old days.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at RAND full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Great Human Resources services and benefits; they take very good care of researchers and support staff; wonderful facilities to work in in the Pittsburgh, DC, and Santa Monica offices; intellectually challenging and globally topical substance being worked on and discussed each day.

Cons – Death by meeting, death by the internal process vortex of doom, and death by calcification of internal organizational structure (and lack of flexibility between or within internal groups); a cautious fear permeates a significant portion of the service groups which tamps down innovation or real growth; skill sets are encouraged to stagnate; *severe* lack of investment into personnel development and training; there a minimal avenues for advancement.

Advice to Senior Management – Take corrective actions against ineffective managers, but in particular TRAIN your support staff managers in *how* to manage people - and not just retreats but hands on help. They really need it, and they really don't know that they need it. Also, remember to invest in the professional development of your support staff - not everyone working there is a PhD or MD and some people yet need more education and training in order to do their day-to-day jobs more effectively.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend