Epic reviews

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.

-In the PM role, you are worked to the bone until you can't take it anymore. Epic's staffing philosophy for Project Managers is to hire people right out of college and burn them out until either the person's quality of work goes down (in which case Epic will fire them) or the person quits. -Expect to be staffed to a customer in your first week or two of starting and then be traveling out to your customer site within a month or two. As a manager who was forced to staff my team members during their first week of employment due to massive growth, it was very difficult to see the look of fear in your team members eyes (and rightly so). -Don't think that because you "love to travel" that you will love business travel with Epic. Expect 3-4 work trips a month where you leave on a Monday and come back on a Thursday. However, as Epic's priority is how many hours you can work, and not making travel as easy and low-stress as possible, you can't fly out until late Monday afternoon and you will typically arrive at your customer site at 10pm or 11pm. Expect an early morning start during your week on site, then a late Thursday flight out (again, need to maximize your # of working hours!) that gets you home at 11pm or 12am on Thursday. Your Friday will be filled with many mandatory meetings--usually starting at 8am at the latest, so don't plan on sleeping in after your trip. -70 hour weeks are quite common. At a recent staff meeting, the CEO posted a slide that pointed out that the average PM works 57.5 hours per week...however, everyone who had been there over a year laughed at that number, as we all work more than that every week. -ZERO work/life balance. The weeks you are not traveling, you are either working from home in the evenings or staying late at the office. But don't worry, Epic cares about you by giving you a free dinner if you stay late. -Epic is growing their sales like CRAZY and the customer list is shooting through the roof. For each "module" (ex. ER software, billing software), Epic promises the customer one new PM and one experienced PM to work as a team. As you can imagine, there aren't enough experienced PMs to go around, so whereas it was common to be staffed to two customers, getting staffed to three or four is the norm now. This means that you are literally traveling every week and are expected to maintain your same level of service and quality of work, while having your workload literally doubled. -There is zero career growth at this company in the PM role if you decide that you want to stop (or reduce) business travel after several years. It is VERY difficult to transition to a non-traveling role like training or QA and there are no roles in the PM area that do not involve travel. So, your only option is to quit. -Stress levels amongst PMs is very high. Everytime I would go to the doctor (and it wasn't always the same doctor), they would ask me if I worked at Epic (they could just tell based on our age usually) and when I said yes, they would start talking to me about my mental health. I had one physician who told me that she wished that her clinic had never purchased Epic solely for how they treat their employees--due to how frequently she would see Epic staff coming to urgent care and being so frazzled. If you are prone to stress and anxiety--you have been warned.