Wood Mackenzie reviews

3.0

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(586 total reviews)
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Jason Liu

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100% positive business outlook

Wood Mackenzie has an employee rating of 3.0 out of 5 stars, based on 586 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The Wood Mackenzie employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Management & Beratung industry (3.7 stars).

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586 reviews
2.0
Nov 26, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good salary and benefits Good team members that have been drawn by the brand reputation of old

Cons

WoodMac and PowerAdvocate change leadership like they change their underpants - there is clearly some unhappy people at the top. Strategy is not clear so Executive team get sick of the lack of commitment to a direction and leave. Those that stay are stuck in their ways and are sitting on a pile of cash that they received when WoodMac was acquired and sold multiple times - ultimately ending up in the hands of Verisk - that has no idea what to do with it. Corporate HR are driving a constant headcount reduction agenda because the labour cost is too high. People are constantly watching their backs constantly scared of the witch-hunting HR organisation. Verisk parent company has no interest in pursuing a Consulting business as the revenue streams are volatile. They just want a boring subscription business which drives decisions around consulting resourcing and strategy. VPS are very territorial and do not work together. This limits the work that you get to do and the career opportunities available to junior employees. Consulting and Research don’t work together well and hence have conflicting analysis on many sectors. .

1.0
Nov 17, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

-Nice people mostly, the odd ego apart -Investing in improved systems that look nice for customers but no one seems to know how it will affect work yet -Encourage internal career mobility but suspect that's mainly because they have to.

Cons

-Beware if you've experienced research and analysis elsewhere: this is industrialised data production. Data scraping from websites, data entry/cut and paste into standardised "models" (it's not modelling) for DCF valuation by systems (not you) and data "management" (herding it through legacy bolted together systems and conducting infinite data checks). You're a stand-in for a decent IT system. Some industry analysis possible but it's a minority of the time, squeezed between the attritional data stuff, and little actually going on to analyse by the team's own admission. The data churn doesn't give you the knowledge to do the stuff that looks more like analysis and you're not readily helped with getting it. Very disappointing. -Focus on box ticking (quantity and timing) and what looks good on managers' KPIs. -Introduced agile working methods relatively recently. Absolute waste of time and surprising given claimed culture aims: actually endangers it as it reinforces sense of general micro-management, lack of trust/empowerment and sweating the staff. Where I come from, it's a manger's job to know what work is going on in the team and trust staff to do it or say when they can't. -More chiefs than indians. Seems vastly bureaucratic. It seems people who don't leave eventually get promoted to some new "head of" job. -People mostly nice and there a long time - usually a good thing but perhaps creates a sense of survivorship bias, institutionalisation, complacency and need for fresh blood. Manifests itself in different ways. Strange assumption of knowledge everywhere: you should know what they know even after only months in the door. No holistic training of any note, just transactional. Thrown into the churn and then have work pulled apart afterwards, which is fundamentally backward. -Poor pay. Previous roles paid 55-80% more. I accepted it for the opportunity to get into oil and gas analysis, but it was nowhere near that and pay reflects the job's admin orientation. Also always trying to penny pinch. The only place I've had to pay for my welcome lunch. Small but sets the tone. Welcome indeed. -Poor systems. Being addressed to be fair but still large uncertainties re roles. You can see this company being far less labour intensive in future the way tech is going. It could be disrupted beyond all recognition before long and oil and gas faces its own challenges. -Lot of change going on which you'd hope is for the long term good but it feels frantic/chaotic. It's not clear they really know where this is going for careers. -Fair amount of staff turnover - surprise, surprise. Turnover leaves clear knowledge gaps in teams which may also be behind new-entrant training issues.

2.0
Jan 30, 2017

Awful constant restructuring

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Congenial working environment, colleagues were once focused on research and knowledge sharing so plenty to learn from each other. Quality of analysis is superb. Great work-life balance

Cons

Repeated restructuring/banding is a pain and distraction to employees. Loss of key sales personnel that will steal business away eventually. Power struggle and politics seem to be the current focus of employees and bosses, a sad sight in stark contrast to the good old days....

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Wood Mackenzie Response
9y
Hi there, I'm the APAC Head of Research at Wood Mackenzie and I wanted to take the time to thank you for your service at the company and your feedback. I’m glad to hear you enjoyed the working environment and were able to experience a good work/life balance. We certainly value this - we care about each other, we are committed to wellness and balance for all. Thanks also for the compliment on the quality of our analysis. I'd like to address your point around restructuring. Yes, we are in the midst of a change process which can be a challenge but it is so that we can do better, embracing management improvement techniques as well as technology to improve existing processes and to unlock the vast amount of creativity and innovation across our 1,300 people. We are not perfect but we strive hard to do what's right for each other and for our clients. Gavin
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