Pros
The stand out benefit of working for AAB was the ability to "work where you want" and "when you want" so long as your clients are kept happy. This was a great benefit, and I wasn't aware of any MI which meant that the benefit led to a drop in service levels; but sadly just before I left, this benefit was being curtailed heavily, and colleagues pressured to return to office. The people are also largely clever and good to work with. My experience with other employees was almost always positive - they were helpful, polite, and eager to help train you in an area that you didn't have experience of. Besides this, AAB was, in my experience, fairly average/good in pretty much every other way. AAB pays at a decent level, and the benefits package is decent. I came to AAB via acquisition, and I much preferred times pre-acquisition to post.
Cons
As ever, it's likely that the cons/negatives will stick with an employee much longer than the positives ever will when they leave a business. The cons I experienced at AAB were mainly operational, but also a little cultural in nature. The cons fell into 6 categories: - Tech Stack - Mostly Old People - Lack of Tools & Resources - Disorganisation (fed by the first 2 above) - Poor communication - Office Politics - Tech Stack / Lack of Tools & Resources AAB prides its self on being a tech-enabled services company. I struggle with this though, as the only "tech" the business uses is Excel and e-mail (at least these were the only real tools which were made available to me). Of course, it was possible to sign up for free accounts of other systems and other tools, but anything which required a subscription was not authorised, and so as a team, we felt as though we were stuck in the year 2004 when it came to maximising efficiency. This wasn't a *great* look, as it meant we weren't really able to work with our clients as effectively and the tools they themselves used (beyond instant messaging systems and Microsoft Office). - Mostly Old People Lookup AAB on LinkedIn and navigate to the employee section. Scroll through the results, and you'll see that a large proportion of the team (particularly those in senior roles) are all very old. Naturally, seniority = more experience = older, obviously - but it confirms that their hiring model is based on experience rather than exceptional talent and achievement. This senior management make-up tells a story about the resistance to using tools, and the really "old school" way of doing HR, which, from what I could tell, existed in a purely administrative capacity. This is the "old dog" in the title of my review", and the "new tricks" it's trying to learn include (but is not limited to) the hip (but 'off' and cringy) branding. The branding is bright, young, vibrant and modern. The offices, culture and management style have about as much vibrancy as cold toast. Internally, AAB feels like a 1980's local authority office which processes parking fines. Watch the 1999 movie Office Space, and you'll get a fairly clear picture of what it's like to work there. The scene about the TPS report cover sheets? That happened to me multiple times. Feedback delivered poorly by multiple people at multiple levels, when it's better kept central and confidential between line manager and employee. - Disorganisation A number of other reviews have discussed how AAB has grown quickly through acquisition and that this has caused growing pains. This is definitely true. The speed of the integration process was glacial. The approach was. 1. AAB buys a company 2. AAB partners introduce themselves to the team 3. The acquired company is now AAB 4. Integration complete It was no more well thought through than this, and that was also the feedback of those at Director level. You can only imagine the level of disorganisation this creates. - Poor Communication Likely an artifact of disorganisation. Big breaking news events like "by the way, there's another company joining your department" (which, naturally leads to duplicated roles and redundancies) were kept from team members up until the very last minute, making the atmosphere feel constantly uncertain - as if at any moment some other earth shattering news could be announced out of the blue, and that news not be in your favor. It all felt very clandestine, unpredictable and uncertain. I understand why things are done this way, but it speaks to a lack of trust. It would have been nice to know that "something" was "potentially" in track to change before we all started applying for jobs when the surprise uncertainty rolled around again. All of this means you actually "feel like an employee". Like a worker bee. Subject to the ebbs and flows, expansion and contraction of the company, rather than as a person who has thoughts, feelings, and gets worried when there's surprise news of yet another merger because you have a family to feed and bills to pay. It was quite cold and distant. I didn't feel an warmth or love for AAB for this reason. I didn't feel as though I was "a part" of anything. - Office Politics There's nothing I hate more than office politics, and AAB was rife with it. My actions, despite being well-intentioned, and for the good of the business (or a client) would almost always be viewed with suspicion - as if I were doing it for my own personal benefit. There wasn't an acceptance that someone could just be objective, and want to do the right thing. Leavers were often slandered, on quite a few occasions by Director level. When someone leaves, there's of course no opportunity for them to defend their work and what they done during their time there. Those things may well have been easily explainable, and with context make complete sense, but upon leaving the ex-employee doesn't have that luxury of self defense. So that is often taken by senior management as an opportunity to further themselves and their own teams. "Look what X did - we've only uncovered this now that they've left. If they were my employee I'D have fixed this!" "Just found out that when A was here, they said B to C. The truth always comes out!" "I can't believe that L did that! I know that M will do a much better job as I trained them!" Senior management made a habit of weaponising those who left to further their own agendas. I am aware since I myself have left, that I've become an especially favorite target of this kind of behaviour. I could pursue it, but I already raised it in my exit interview and nothing was done about it, so I know nothing more will be done about it. I know who the perpitrators are though, and I have a large enough (215,000+ ish) Twitter following that if I wanted to "out" them I could at the drop of a hat, and cause a heck of a lot of pain for them and to the AAB business, but I won't because I know they'll read this and think better of their choices in future.