Pros
- Could be a genuine starting point if you're interested in a career of working in Student Accommodation, however did not pursue the opportunity to progress. After my experience, this is not a career I'd recommend if you value not losing your hair over stress. - All the permanent, non agency frontline staff, the ones you primarily work with in your building are nice. Some characters like in every job, but for the most part everyones nice enough. - The occasional fulfilment when you genuinely help out a student. Although this feels like a rarity in this job, as you often cannot provide effective solutions to often simple issues, due to things out of your control. However when it feels like you teach someone a valuable life skill, this can make it bearable. - Pay is relatively decent. From what I've gathered they do a yearly bonus & salary increase (if you've completed your probation) across the whole company. This isn't a huge bonus, but it is nice to get. - Alright notice in regards to rotas (dependant on your manager). Got my rotas done in bulk, so you'd normally get your rotas for the next few months at a time. Some but little flexibility usually in changing your shifts, as they'd need to find someone else from another site to cover or swap, or if the manager owes you a favour basically.
Cons
- Building Quality. Now this is a luck of the draw scenario. If you get put in a nice new building, this won't be a huge con for a while. However, a lot of these buildings have been rushed, cut corners and overall done a botched job. This means that your time at the front desk will just be listening to maintenance complaints, logging them, and trying to offer a solution - however due to the scattered communication you are actively encouraged to not be specific with repair timeframes, so you often have to give a "it'll be fixed soon" answer, which is a pretty useless and rubbish way of "being there for them", which is what the company advertises itself as. - Under equipped maintenance team. This feeds into the first point, but still stands alone. Clusters of several buildings will often have one or maybe two trained specialist maintenance contractors (plumbers, electricians). Which basically gives them a massive back-log of jobs, so they unfortunately take ages to get to their jobs. No fault of the team, but the lack of funding and staff. Adds to the waitlist, with some issues never truly being fixed, just temporarily patched up until it breaks again. - Summer, Check In, Check Out, Mid-Terms. These are the definitely the periods throughout the year that the staff hate the most, causing a big loss of staff. During Summer, the idea is that the buildings are near enough empty. In theory this should allow for inspections, big fixes, and refirburation projects to be done. Purely the reason of more money, the almighty higher ups decided to partially turn the building into a make shift hotel for other educational institutes, often language schools or summer schools. Not only does this generate a pathetic amount of extra income for the company, but it also means that the staff then have to divert their attention from inspecting, paperwork & fixing up these buildings to deal with the "Summer Stays" - which are often an unorganised mess, with people randomly checking in with zero notice. This also creates more maintenance issues with a smaller timeframe to fix them before everyone check's in for University in September. For the two Check-In's I've done whilst working here, the building had no team leader due to them leaving, or staff shortage. This meant that the SETM's had to maintain the building with little knowledge of what needs doing, which we were not paid extra for. This lead to an overly stressful check-in both times, due to this and the reasons above. Often doing 8-9 days in a row, or 16 hour days during this period due to understaffing. Check out isn't as bad but still overly stressful, as there often isn't much of a turnover to the summer stay period - High turnover of staff. Lots of people in and out through the door. Does make it hard to connect with your team, especially if they're hired via agency. We've had some alright agency staff, but a lot of ones who did not pull their weight, which left extra responsibilties to us. They do also move you around when they need to, also adding to the lack of the team feeling. - Progression seems hard and not worth it. Seen a handful of people in my position be promoted to Team Lead, and then leave shortly after due to an insane work load. There's also positions in the head office, but only seemed accessible if you knew the right people. - Shift Patterns. There's two shift patterns, 7am - 3pm & 2pm - 10pm, which you're meant to rotate between every week. Whilst the 7ams you need to be up at stupid in the morning, for nothing to happen for 2/3 hours, it would be nice to finish at 3 and have the chance to live a little afterwards. The 2pm - 10pm was often the busier and worse of the two. Primarily the fact that you get back late, and then you end up waking up later the next day, you find that your entire day is more or less eaten up by this shift and commuting, leaving little opportunity to have a work life balance on these shifts. The shift patterns also require you to work every other weekend. As someone with a background in hospitality and working every weekend, this wasn't awful, weekends here are often very quiet too. HOWEVER, due to the commitment of having one weekend on and off, it often means that you'll work the Saturday and Sunday, and THEN have to do a Monday - Friday, so you end up doing 7 days in a row every other week. As it's not considered "the same working week", this allows the company to get away with a very dodgy and grey area working hour practice, that massively fatigues the team. Even if this job was perfect otherwise, making people continuously do these 7 shifts in a row leads to fatigue, burnout and eventually leaving all together. - Overpromising. This is normally to do with building works, saying we'll have things fixed, or "looked into" - normally meant they'll just be forgotten about. - Interrupted breaks. Mainly on the 2 - 10s. Due to these shifts being lone working more or less after 5pm and that the companies commitment to "being there 24/7" , this means you have to deal with any on-site issues. Honestly, it's easier to count the 30 minute breaks that haven't been interrupted due to someone needing something, as I've had so few in the time i've been here. Even if you try and wait to deal with an issue after your allotted break, the student will often call the contact centre, who will call you until you help them. Sometimes it's to deal with semi-urgent issues such as them locking themselves out - which is fairer, but sometimes they just want to use the pool table or something that just isn't urgent enough to warrant interrupting the only 30 minutes you're meant to have to yourself. - Language barriers between international students. Whilst this is definitely not on Unite, the challenge of trying to explain something to someone who has a limited grasp on the language can be frustrating. Some international students are very rude, whilst some can be lovely, but the rude ones will be a lot more trouble to your day to day. Even if you politely try and help them, they'll send you an angry poorly translated email stating that their life has been ruined because the bank hasn't sent them a letter yet and it's all your fault. More support needed for both internationals and the staff - The "Above and Beyond" approach This is essentially upper management bugging your team to either upsell some lame incentive, get them to do some survey, or try and put on an event for them, on top of everything else you're trying to keep up with. When you're working in what's their home, which is already overpriced and crawling with issues that stop them sometimes doing the essenstial things, the last thing you'd want to say to someone expressing these issues is "hey leave us a review / download our app!! :)". Again, if you don't do these things you get a poke by the upper management to "really sell the EXPERIENCE". You cannot sell a good fulfilment or belonging experience by putting on some lame pizza night when there's people in the building lacking the essential physiological and safety needs of an accommodation. - NOMs. Double edged, essenstially some buildings the unis co own, therefore they sometimes can deal with issues like debt, but also means you need to go through a third party for something easily sortable in house. - Poor facilties on site. They use CIRCUIT laundry, which has to be the worst laundry service. Called them for repairs more times than I've called anyone else, like ever. Also they just need more bins, considering they "want to be green"