Pros
Although I gave a 2 star review and my experience was mostly unpleasant, I’ll try to be as fair as possible in my review. One of the pros of this job is that you’re likely to work with friendly, likeminded people who are genuinely nice. There is value in the service you provide as an energy advisor, so you do get job satisfaction out of it and feel like you’re contributing to positive change. This is coming from a person who hates customer service! You’ll speak to customers about a wide range of topics, which helps open up new career opportunities in different areas. There’s decent support for mental health if you’re ever struggling.
Cons
The main con for me is that this is a target based job, which is not really mentioned in the hiring and training process. There is a target for everything and they are pretty absurd, mainly because their system is designed to work against the advisor. You’ll feel like you’re always swimming against the tide and the job gets repetitive very quickly, so it’s unrealistic to keep your targets consistently at the level they want for longer than 6 months. If you fail to reach targets, they will often make you feel like you’re not doing enough, no matter how hard you work. If things don’t improve they will also make you feel like your job security is under threat. Although you get job satisfaction for contributing to positive change, this only lasts a few months due to the toxic culture of reaching targets and making you feel like crap when you don’t meet them. Despite being a customer service job, it feels more like a glorified sales job because of all the targets, except that you don’t get a commission when you reach them. Similarly, although the support for mental health is a good thing, you wouldn’t need it in the first place if it was a more positive working environment. There is very little opportunity to do anything other than being on the phone. As long as you’re there, they’ll expect you to be on the phone at all times and will be on your case to squeeze as much out of you as they possibly can. This is a heavily monitored job, which makes you feel like you’re constantly under surveillance. Any error will be picked up and again, they’ll make you feel like crap for making mistakes. Any minor error on your part or a wider issue within the team is blown completely out of proportion. Their expectation of you as an employee and a human being are completely unrealistic. You’ll probably find that they say all the right things because the company wants to be seen as really progressive, but in practice they do the exact opposite. Overall, my negative experiences overshadowed the positives, which is a real shame and could have been avoided. Would I recommend Changeworks as a place to work? I’d say it depends. The particular area I worked at had its own procedures, but other parts of the organisation may have a better culture. If you were going for the energy advisor role, I would recommend it as long as you had a clear plan to move on to something else within the first 6-12 months, as you’ll certainly get sick of it pretty quickly. If that’s not the case or you feel like you might be stuck in that role for a longer period for whatever reason, I’d say think carefully before applying. This role is advertised several times throughout the year and there’s a reason for that.
