Barclays Coventry Reviews

Pros

Flexi Bonus Easy to move with the Bank

Cons

Hard to get back in once you leave

Pros

- Barclays offer exceptional work/life balance via the "Dynamic working" scheme, which was well established before 2020 & Covid-19. You are able to adjust your working hours or/and work from home, as long as you manage to manage your workload. Just great service. - Barclays is a huge organization with millions of customers. Any project that you are involved might result in millions of additional revenue or reduced costs, which is always nice both for personal satisfaction but also to include in your CV. - Barclays supports heavily volunteering. There is a pound-for-pound match for any donations made by employees to most global non-profit organizations and initiatives and you are able to participate in Barclays' Lifeskills program, which is a great program with mane opportunities to get involved in volunteering around your area. - The benefits package is quite generous. The pension scheme must be one of the best in the UK market, private healthcare, annual bonus, buying stocks at preferential rates, income protection, etc. - Redundancy rounds. Barclays during the past couple years was under an enormous restructuring. So lots of people was offered to leave the bank and get significant redundancy packages. If you want to change a job anyway, then this might be a nice way to get a great bonus on your way out.

Cons

- Lots of politics - Lots of scrutiny, bureaucracy (I guess like everywhere in financial services) - Limited resources - You will never be able to hire the number of people that you need. It is very rare to have them pay for any professional certification/training. When I joined in the first 2 weeks I didn't have a laptop, and then they gave me an old/used one from someone who left! It wasn't even cleaned properly and it was disgusting. I finally got a new laptop after 12 months! - As mentioned it's a great company to work and has great benefits. So you will meet many people who are working in Barclays for more than 10-15 years (and some even stay for their whole career!). This means that eventually, you might have a manager who joined Barclays right after school and managed to get promoted after so many years. Hence, you should expect that you might have to work along people who are not the brightest or/and have limited skills when compared with other companies at that level. - Redundancy rounds. I mentioned earlier this as a pro. But it's a con as well, especially for people who were close to retiring and it's almost impossible for them to find another job at an advanced age. Also, quite tricky to become redundant during a pandemic (COVID-19).

Pros

Parking was available. There was a pension scheme.

Cons

I was based in Coventry Westwood business park personal risk. This was my first job after leaving University. It was just a really horrible place to work. I think you would call it a culture of 'passive aggressive' bullying now. Memories of this was an office whereby nobody spoke to anyone. Silence was the norm for the whole day. My job was to in effect understudy a contractor with the intention of taking over her job! She who didn't want to lose her job. This put me in a very awkward position. She reported to the head of the department that I couldn't do my job with my inevitable dismissal due to incompetence. It took me a while to get my confidence and career back on track. I don't think I will ever truly recover from it.