Great colleagues and mission, awful environment and leadership - Anonymous employee Atom Learning Employee Review

There are loads of wonderful people who are great at what they do and happy to collaborate and support each other. There are also some good benefits, such as flexible working and opportunities to work abroad.

I wasn't planning to add a review, but since there are clearly fake reviews spinning everything, here is my experience. • As others have mentioned, salary levels are middling. Whilst there are open offers to discuss salary in theory, they are always shut down in practice. • For commercial teams, targets are generally arbitrary and unrealistic. Should these be missed, leadership swiftly and quietly fires people, or suddenly moves them into roles that are either a demotion or to completely different teams where you are unlikely to be successful. • To that end, there are regular team reorganisations to try to make things better, without actually understanding and addressing the real issues. • There is also no real room for career progression. There are vague discussions, but in practice it mostly looks like taking on additional work but being told to wait for a salary increase. More work for less pay is the way.

The company is genuinely a great place to work. The working hours are very flexible and can be tailored to suit your schedule, and tutors are able to choose students they feel most aligned with. In my opinion, the pay is reasonable for the level of effort required. The company also provides slides and helpful resources to support lesson planning, and the administrative side is straightforward and easy to manage for both tutors and clients. Most importantly, the management team is extremely accommodating and supportive in difficult situations. In my experience, they have provided valuable guidance when dealing with challenging parents, particularly in setting professional boundaries and addressing instances of verbal abuse, which made me feel well supported as a tutor.

At the beginning, additional time may be needed outside of working hours to prepare lesson slides and materials, so the role can initially feel quite time-consuming. However, once you become familiar with the process and build up resources, the workload becomes much more manageable and relatively low effort. At times, it can also be slow to gain clients, particularly when there are many tutors applying. However, I found that building strong relationships with students and parents, alongside receiving positive feedback, helped significantly in securing more clients over time. Tutors do receive less than half of the amount charged to clients by the company. That said, the recent pay increase has made the role feel worthwhile overall considering the level of effort and flexibility involved.