Leadership in training left much to be desired. Instructional designers were never involved in the analysis phase. Every project was handled differently. No real project management styles, no instructional design models ever used. Everything felt very unstructured. Very difficult to get access to SME's and questions went around in circles. Some of the worst micromanagement I think I have ever endured. Poor communication, lack of transparency and clarity. Lots of pointless repetition and confusion in meetings. People were frequently asked to repeat even the simplest of questions, yet the questions were somehow never answered, just loads of meaningless jargon. Deadlines were never stated clearly. Abrupt changes to projects on a regular basis, and the changes often were not communicated to all stakeholders. More than once I was assigned to do a "very important" project that was suddenly abandoned and then never revisited, while I was instead given bizarre busywork. Many good people were treated badly and then left. The team WAS fairly diverse but almost every person of color on my team was laid off or else voluntarily left at the end of 2025. The actual trainings produced by my team were often quite a mess. Document control was nonexistent. The same training modules were created over and over, with slight differences each time - but these redundancies were rarely ever tracked, just more and more re-work of the exact same material. Meanwhile, I was yelled at for things I was not even involved in, accused of missing a deadline that I was not told about, and confronted in a "surprise" super-early-morning meeting, for allegedly messing up some project that I had literally never even heard of. To be honest, I don't think I was ever treated worse by any management at any other job I have ever had. I occasionally wondered if I was being deliberately gaslit just to see how I would react, like some sort of sadistic Stanley Milgram experiment. If that WAS the case, I hope they at least got some useful data out of me, because I did not enjoy it, to say the least. I think that was just par for the course, though, because I eventually learned that several of my co-workers had similar experiences - some even worse than mine. It was a relief to be laid off.
