Pros
I'm sharing this review because it would have helped me when I worked at Keyence. Having some outside perspective from someone who moved on to get a no Kool-Aid take on the company. I spent 4 years at Keyence, and left during my promotion to Sales Specialist. * Good compensation coming out of college. For having next to 0 work experience, you can expect to clear 60-90k your first year depending on COL in your area. * They'll teach you to work hard (long term pro, short term con). * The office culture can be a lot of fun, with big caveats on which office you're in, your personality, and gender potentially (typically a bro culture). * Visit top-tier companies in your territory, meet a lot of smart people. * The most important thing Keyence does for your career - build fundamental skills in customer-facing or GTM cycles.
Cons
It's going to sound like I'm just dumping on the company here, but keep in mind, Keyence was an incredibly valuable experience for me. It gave me the skills and confidence to go out and get my actual dream job. It's like a sales boot camp. Through hard work and repetition, you'll learn core business skills. Just like bootcamp though, you want to leave eventually, it's time to graduate. * First the compensation, it's good out of college, it's bad compared to the industry average. APSM's will struggle to clear 170k. IC's in other top-tier sales roles routinely clear 200k, not to mention managers in those orgs. * No benefits that would make Keyence competitive with other top-tier sales orgs. No stock options, no health account spending plan, no catering or in-office meals, no company car. You have base pay and bonus, that's it. * As you'll read a million times here, work-life balance is generally terrible. This is because you essentially work in a call center Monday Friday, and are busting butt visiting as many customers as possible the rest of the week. In many divisions hauling heavy equipment in and out of labs for a 20-minute demo to people with passing interest and no buying power. I ended up faking about half my sales calls, and still exceeding goal for years. Their core sales motion and metric tracking is incredibly broken. * I heard numerous times from management that no one left Keyence and ended up better for it. Let me tell you firsthand, along with my numerous friends that also moved on from Keyence, it's not difficult after a few years to move up. Not just in compensation, but in overall WLB and enjoying your job. * One of the biggest pitfalls of Keyence, you aren't building very many marketable skills. All their software is homegrown, so you can't put Tableau, or Salesforce, or PowerBI, or SAP, etc. on your resume. They use a 1995 looking internal CRM system that is slow and archaic. Aside from systems, the products you sell are niche. So it's tough to break out of the industrial automation space. Work on your skillset on the side, so that you can make an impactful move to a company you'll really enjoy working for. * Almost all new hires are straight out of college like I was. This allows them to a certain extend to brainwash the salesforce into thinking "this is just how things are." No one at Keyence has outside experience (or very little). It's like dating your first girlfriend. She tells you she's the best you'll ever have. If you never move on, you won't know what you're missing. * Keyence has started raising alarm bells internally recently because revenue growth has slowed for the first time in decades. The stock has tanked since February. It turns out cold calling 100 people a day in 2021 isn't how top sellers perform. As this is a top-down Japanese company, they decided recently to double down on this strategy rather than address the incompatibility it has with modern sales target personas. * Look, Keyence isn't horrible, it's a great place to start in many respects. But don't get sucked in and waste your career there, I promise you can do much better.