After the initial 8 week training period, you start as a generalist fielding questions from Bloomberg customers over an Instant Chat service. Essentially a glorified call centre role. After a stint of doing this from 1-2 years (some might be a bit quicker), you are assigned to a sales team where you put your knowledge of how the BBG terminal works to demonstrate the tools to clients. For the lucky few this may involve a bit of travel, but in terms of actually what you are doing, it is just showing people how the bbg tools work face to face. I.e. show them how to pull up graphs, display their news properly. Once you get a bit more senior in the role you may start to show clients tools related to valuing swaps, options and how to chart using technical analysis. That said, there are always specialists who know more, so you never go into too much detail with clients. The main goal of you as a rep at this stage is to sell, and targets are clearly visible using internal systems to all employees and managers.
If you're not in the top half of the scoreboard you are harrassed about your performance. As one person on my team put it "it was best to not be too good, as you will get noticed, but also not to be too bad, else you got noticed" so the idea was to strategically not draw too much attention to yourself for fear of getting questioned on your performance.
Managers in this place are not actual 'managers' - in that they don't encourage, support nor get the most out of people. The company promotes from within, and so those who rise to managers are simply those who have stuck it out and have more 'familiarity' with the product.
This is something the company needs to address, as having someone who is experienced and having someone who can manage others are clearly not one of the same thing.
Managers (not just mine) have a reputation of micro-managing and creating a stressful environment for it's employees.
There is often a clique between managers and certain employees on the teams too (star performers) which excludes about 80% of the team so you do the math - this kind of culture will only serve to promote those at the top, when another way of looking at the same problem would be to raise the performance standard for everyone, and not to discriminate. This would be more socially and financially profitable to the team and culture.
Lots of things wrong with this organisation, but I guess it is similar to other places where at the end of the day it is all about sales. You either love that kind of environment or you don't.
