Chemonics International Reviews

Pros

Chemonics is a young, dynamic environment with a lot of great people passionate about making a difference in the world. Unlike a lot of smaller organizations in global development, Chemonics focuses a lot on career growth. That means major investment in training; most mid-, senior, and executive-level jobs are filled through internal promotion; and there is a strong culture of continual learning. The company is 100% employee-owned, and each year about 10% of your salary in company stock is put in your retirement plan at no charge. That is generous, but particularly amazing this year because the stock price doubled as the company grew so quickly.

Advice to Management

The CEO has a very calm, steady hand and stays the course even while similar organizations panic and change strategy constantly.

Pros

Pro and con: there is no sick time--it's all Universal Leave, so people come in sick and get other people sick. But if you're there a long time, you end up with 20-25 days Universal Leave.
As stated by other reviewers, the HMO is fully paid for (or very cheap). It's nice they do this because it helps young and/or low paid employees save.

Pros

- Train their employees well
- The QMS is a wonderful thing (you might not love systems, but wait until you don't have one)
- Opportunities for entry level employees to travel
- $3000 education stipend and support for conferences (based on supervisor approval)

Advice to Management

Institute a more transparent system for promotions

Pros

Great for opportunities if you are willing to dedicate yourself to international development, continuous improvement, and matrix management.

Advice to Management

Keep improving talent management, human resources and IT systems while ensuring quality development results, and ability to communicate them.

Pros

Great opportunities and cool work, nice coworkers.

Advice to Management

Put less pressure on associates.

Pros

HR folks generally very responsive, professional. 3-4 rounds of interviews

Advice to Management

work samples would be more interesting in identifying talent (eg writing sections of the proposals, creating a gantt chart for a fake project etc)

Pros

Chemonics is an outstanding training ground for international development. You will get very broad technical, geographic, and administrative experience. Extremely transferrable skills that are sought after and highly regarded by other organizations throughout the industry.

Pros

If you have USAID IP experience, and/or a technical skill in high demand for field projects like M&E, power generation, finance, COP/DCOP, then life in the field is not bad for the most part. Employees are treated well, there are great benefits if you are in the field, good structure, written procedures, and online support. In fact I would say Chemonics internal structure, and support systems outclass most IP's.

Advice to Management

First step: Stop the internal policy of rotation SVP and executive level personnel every seven years. Shop for outside talent from different industries. Realize that most former Peace Corp employees are too empathetic to employ a solid backbone of management, and fiscal responsibility. Cut layers of management to be more competitive when bidding. Employ bonuses for senior leaders based on stretch goals. Cure notice or loss of project due to management needs to lead to change out of executive level management. Company is too big to drag along dead weight. Stop the practice of bringing back failed managers to meet proposal specs for field assignments. Open up director level positions to outside the IP industry. Insist on PMP certification for promotion from Associate to Manager or Manager to Director. Processes are so conservative, and over the top, that it severely effects the field operations. Talent is being stolen by other IP's regularly. Example, underpaid associate with MBA from ivy league school is earning $45k, the competition will easily hire them away for $75k-$85k for doing the same job. Time to reshuffle the deck, bring in outside help, and poll field offices to find out wha the constraints are from home office support-policy, and fix it. Industry will shrink in the near future, as will funding. Chemonics is a GREAT company, that needs a hardcore reboot before it ends up several rungs down the ladder. Competitors are wining jobs based on paired down overhead, and lower operating costs in the field. Last item, Chemonics is probably one of the worst companies with start ups, and shut downs. Start ups are serious business, and this has been a constant issue. Most companies employ full time start up teams, with professional experience from the home office, not STTA's with little to no experience fresh out of college, this is a losing formula, and has cost Chemonics contracts.

Pros

Some dedicated international development professionals, who want to do their jobs well.

Pros

Generally fair to staff overseas

Advice to Management

Fight for your overseas staff when it comes to equitable duty of care package with US Govt client staff