Good company - Social Media Manager SAM Learning Employee Review

The people are generally nice. In my time there were certainly lots of lovely and talented folk, and working with them was a pleasure.

This will sound harsh, but the CEO is a joke. He knows nothing about running a company and will waste money on charlatan business gurus. He says things are completely nonsensical, he has limited social skills, rarely if ever able to empathise or communicate effectively with his employees. His awkwardness and inability are so much like David Brent it's sometimes hard to believe. Aside from being treated constantly as children by this man, the effect of his involvement is the consistent rounds of redundancies that seem to happen every year as a result of poor financial performance and planning, and a lack of business acumen. Career opportunities in such a small company, if you can last through the frequent rounds of redundancies, are very slim. It's possible that as a first job, SAM Learning is not such a bad move. Otherwise, I would strongly advise against working here.

The central London location of the offices.

The previous reviewer that likened the CEO to David Brent could not be more right. He has quite the messiah complex and his ego is fuelled by the sycophants that he surrounds himself with (anyone who disagrees with him tends to get mysteriously made redundant). The company doesn't seem to have a great handle on its finances as evidenced by its boom and bust moments. Erratic periods of hiring are then followed by mass redundancies when they realise they can't afford it. A move to a premium new office in Covent Garden only lasted a year before they had to downsize to somewhere they could afford. To illustrate the David Brent analogy, on one particular redundancy of several people, the CEO drew a speeding car on a whiteboard. Pointing to it, he said, 'this is SAM learning'. Then he drew a brick wall and said, if we don't cut costs immediately, we're heading straight for a crash. And with that he announced redundancies. Not a place I'd recommend working at.