Disorganized - Engineering Technician Northern Technologies (MN) Employee Review

Diverse work environment, and opportunity to work and grow in your career. Very flexible with work - life balance.

Location of office made for some longer commutes to certain job sites.

The work isn't terribly complicated or hard. It's physically demanding, sure, but the work itself is generally pretty interesting and straight forward. The culture is also a lot of fun- everyone got along great and I never felt afraid to ask anyone questions if I was confused. You learn a lot and there's a lot of independence on the job, which is great so long as you don't abuse it. I would recommend this job as a way to get your foot in the door, but not for a long term thing.

I worked at NTI for 6 months and there were a lot of internal issues. Little to no communication between admin, project managers, and technicians. I was pretty much functioning in the dark most of the time. The technicians don't have access to any of the information that's needed to go to job sites, which essentially makes us all look like fools when on-site. The lab is growing, but there are still a lot of issues with equipment that the company doesn't seem to feel is important to invest in. Very poor training. 90% of the stuff I learned to do, I learned by doing it. I was taught the bare minimum, if you could even call it that. There's also no consistency in the training. Whenever I would confer with the other technicians we found that we were all told different things in how to perform our job duties. Very little consistency, very little training, a lot of just being thrown into it. Which can be nice because there's a lot of independence, and ultimately the job isn't terribly complicated, but the first month or so is pretty daunting. The work/life balance is non-existent, in my opinion. I didn't know my schedule until the night before and often times it changed the day of. I literally never knew when I would be off work until I was leaving work. I was just an intern, so it didn't bother me much, but I honestly don't know how you would have a planned life outside of this job. Albeit, this isn't entirely the fault of the company and is kind of the nature of the work, but still.