Epic reviews

- Many strict, inflexible processes. Deadlines were automatically set as soon as you started working on something, and you had to talk to a team lead to change them. I was on a big team; I think some of the small teams were better. - Fairly long hours, and before deadlines all developers had to stay till 9 pm some nights regardless of what work they had to do. - Long commute if you want to live near Madison itself. - Outdated technology. I didn't mind Mumps, but VB6 is terrible. Hopefully they've made progress on the transition to C#.

If you like having three miserable full-time jobs at once, this is the place for you. Job #1 - training classes of 30-35 people every week. The classes are a mix of computer folks with no healthcare experience, healthcare pros with no EMR experience, and consultants fresh out of college with no knowledge of either. They will be from lots of different organizations, all with different needs, and will compete with each other to control the classroom with innocuous questions. If, as a trainer, you don't answer all their questions, you will get bad reviews. If you do answer all their questions, you'll get bad reviews from others in class who think you're catering to the questions. Did I mention that you have to train people on text-based programming, people who've probably never used it before, and then keep them from crying when they get frustrated because their bosses want them to get certified in eight weeks (which is WAY too short to understand Epic software)? Job #1A - training internal classes of anywhere from 20-100 new employees. These are kids just out of college, who are used to Facebooking/texting/sleeping in class and don't care about knowing anything, unless they think they can show you up. Their reviews also count against you, even though they have no idea what the standard is that they're supposed to be using. Job #2 - designing lesson plans, E-Learning lessons, and/or other educational materials. These will be minutely dissected by a team of writers, QA'ers, and other trainers. Furthermore, if someone along that chain doesn't think you got it perfect the first time, they'll tell your TL and get you on the naughty list. Job #3 - grading papers and reviewing tests. You get to be a grad assistant! You get to deal with perfectionists who demand to know why they only got a 99% on a certification exam, or conduct reviews over the phone with the consultant who has failed a test three times, doing worse each time, and practically begs you for answers. It's fun! Oh yeah, Job #4 - you may be lucky enough to be a consulting trainer, which means in addition to doing ALL of the jobs above, you'll be on the road every few weeks to help customers set up their training programs. I didn't do that very much, so I can't speak to how that goes very accurately.