Every Move Watched, Every Minute Measured - Anonymous employee F.I.R.S.T. Institute Employee Review

Great to their staff, mature management

care more about money than students education

I loved the upbeat, positive environment working here. My coworkers were incredibly kind and I still keep in touch with some of them! Lots of fun day to day. I felt that the work was meaningful when seeing students achieve their goals.

The pay was simply not enough to sustain independent adult lifestyle. It's definitely not someplace to grow a career. We are artists... Most of us who teach are self employed and do this as a side income stream, and I found that it was demanding enough time to make it challenging to sustain my self employment income, which is what was supporting my future. I found it ethically challenging at times because while we were giving students the skills they came to learn, I felt that in my program, they were being told that this pricey private schooling would help them get a job. As much as I wish that was true, it simply isn't the case. I always worked hard to be honest with my students and help them understand that they would really need to build entrepreneurial skills. The other issue is that there was pretty much no standard at all for passing a class - students would chronically underperform but still pass alongside their hard working peers, which is a disservice to them, because then they are leaving not only without the job the ads promised, but also without the skills. This is my reasoning for giving "culture and values" a 3 stars. If we were talking about kindness from employee to employee, up and down as well as laterally, it would be a 5. But there's an issue with values and dishonesty to students that left me feeling yucky. It's been more than a year since my last bunch of students graduated their program, and maybe 1 of them is working regularly. That crushes me because they are real people with real goals who were being told that investing in this would give them a job.