Pros
There are certainly groups within NRECA worth their salt. A few. If you aren't in one of those groups, NRECA is a huge waste of time. If you like getting paid for low-levels of quality and not put a lot of thought into your work - aka, just being in it for the paycheck, this is a sweet gig. Lifers on the order of Government employees that fill seats and do nothing else will be at home here. If you can stand it, it's a great place for that. Coaching on how to answer surveys such as Computer World Best places to work surveys, and Blessing White/Gallup surveys so you always know you're giving the answer expected by the association, which is very important. They go to great lengths to take the guesswork out of what the "right" answer is. The IT department is led by VERY smart individuals. When they learned the new CEO was "baselining" IT's performance, they managed to get the company that has consulted and advised their direction/technology decisions over the past decade to perform the assessment. A master stroke, if you think about it. You've paid company X to tell you how to run your business. You do everything company X says. Time comes for review of your decisions? Hire company X to determine if the advice THEY gave you, and you've followed to the letter without question, was good advice. What were they going to say? "We gave you bad advice but keep paying us handsomely every year for more of that bad advice?" It was a shining act of brilliance to so brazenly rig the outcome for a report going to a new CEO.
Cons
If you're in tech, the IT shops makes a lot of awesome noises about new tech and good development. They don't follow through with it very often, but they make the right noises and do try - but politics drive everything there. The end result is that a large swathe of the IT department, while strong in their roles, would be like indoor cats trying to survive in the wild if they looked for employment elsewhere if they've been at NRECA too long. If you want to be a lifer somewhere? This is your place. 2:1 ratio of time spent in meetings to time spent coding. If you do Web Development, know that there is no serious web development going on there. The IT group responsible for outward facing web sites is led by someone who acknowledges a near total lack of understanding of the technology and is so bad at outputting high quality, engaging sites, that the association has actually removed the responsibility from them to Communications in an acknowledgement of the sheer ineptitude of the team top-to-bottom. Yet they are still a team that claims responsibility for web b/c once the real work is done, they make text updates for interested parties. A situation which only arose out of the desire of aforementioned manager to protect the team's jobs at the expense of efficiency of people owning their own content. They went so far to protect that setup as to spend MILLIONS of dollars on SharePoint, only to hinder it's implementation b/c to do so it was believed would put the low-skilled web team members at risk (the majority of that team). As a bonus to that situation, the person who runs the team does so like it's a high school clique. Meetings among the team regularly devolve into rudderless wanderings of people not clear on what they should be doing, who understand the lack of impact they have on the overall workings of the association, and know they're lucky to just have jobs. A case in point, when the abjectly poor management of the group's director was pointed out, daily 'scrums' were implemented to facilitate information exchange. Turned out nothing is ever discussed except who is late, and who actually had anything to work on (a frequent occurrence b/c no other groups in the association believe in their quality of work). The end result being an additional place, on top of the 4 already mandated, employees are required to capture their daily tasks and duties. I suspect that was done due to a manager incapable of understanding the information he was even dealing with, but it works to the teams benefit b/c in light of not having anything else to do, reporting on all the nothing they're actually doing DOES fill time nicely. The benefits have been under attack for years. They got progressively worse each passing year. Now they are subpar at best. A bad place to be for an insurance provider. The CEO, who replaced an amazing leader in G. English, is running the place to the ground.