Used to be a fantastic place to work – sadly changing
Pros
I had a fabulous few years at Argus, and loved the majority of my time there. There are a lot of incredibly talented, smart, friendly, and interesting people (sadly though a lot of them seem to be leaving or have left) who I learned a lot from. In particular, the head of London marketing was a real gem. She has crucial industry knowledge and a real dedication to the products.
Cons
Unfortunately in some departments there isn’t a lot of career/role development. By all means, if you do well you’ll pick up more responsibility, but you’ll also keep all of your existing work, meaning a lot of people end up in quite bizarre hybrid roles, focused on important strategic projects as well as basic administrative/logistical work. Rather than spend even a small amount more on additional junior resource, the powers-that-be seem to prefer to squeeze existing teams as much as they possibly can. Obviously this isn’t efficient and those teams resort to just fire-fighting; they can just about meet deadlines and fulfill tactical activities, but they have little to no time to plan properly or take advantage of real opportunities that may present themselves – at least without letting anything else slide off. Adding another layer to that, there has been a lot of change in the business overall – with new senior management and a complete global restructure. Even acknowledging that it’s common for change to bring about discontent/unease in any workforce, there are a lot of things that could have been done a hundred times better and then some others that were downright bizarre. At a simplistic level it seems that they are trying to emulate the market incumbent, but they should be embracing the differentiators that have always made Argus what it is, instead of simply trying to copy. At a more concerning level, some outdated and scattergun approaches to marketing were starting to be introduced – at no point should “clickbait” be a tactic to pursue for example, which is something directly overheard from new senior management. This is in addition to setting arbitrary goals without any strategy behind them. For example, there is no point simply trying to double the size of a marketing prospect list without any (even basic) context such as market segment and job function, let alone commercial goals, projected revenue or even basic market sizing exercises being applied/investigated.
