Pros
Health Benefits are great. For my part, the Line Managers and Leads I have had have been superior, smart, and hard working. All willing to go that extra mile and very "open door". There are really a LOT of good and hard working CRA colleagues to work with and for the most part they do help each other when needed. There are many options to train yourself, and reimbursement for this as well as professional organizations are great thing not all CROs offer. You get BOTH vacation days and SICK days, and yearly PTO total is better than that of some other biggies.
Cons
They set goals for on site and travel that they average in with all other "admin" and training times, and even CRAs on the road 90%+ cannot meet these goals. CRAs are also expected to deduct time spent working on reports, etc., FROM the travel time, rather than perhpas not billing the other work because we do it while traveling. That means if you had flight delays and took 10 hours to get home, but deduct half, you may actually not MEET your travel metric! Crazy, right? Then when you get the performance evaluation, you are deemed "average/meeting expectation" and some have even gotten "needs improvement". I don't know of any CRA here who has gotten an above average rating on the 1-5 thing. In the comments section, yet. This allows them to withold pay raises, which has been common of late even though company IS making money. (Check BusinessWeek Bloomberg report; both acquisitions and stock prices are UP). Expectations of CRAs are really high, work a 60 hour work week and you may or may not get recognition. They sort of seem to want us all to feel like we are just making the grade and it can be a little depressing.