Company: J-P-Morgan
Date: 2014-08-30
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Stop drinking the JPM Kool-Aid
Pros: Great name to have in your CV. Opens doors when applying to MBA's and other jobs. Especially associate roles in finance are constantly asking you to have experience as an analyst in a top tier bank. I guess it serves as an "easy filter". Probably a good company to work for if you are living in the US, but as a European I wouldn't really recommend it.
Cons: Very strict structure, the analyst program is a joke because even though you might have experience in another company if you start as a first year analyst you are stuck as an analyst for the next three years. There is no way to become an associate sooner if you do a good job. Not only that but after working your a off for three years you need to do the A2A process (analyst to associate). This is also a joke because they use it as their excuse not to offer you something in case things are not going well in the company. So you could have worked there for 3 years and then if they don't want to promote you, instead of accepting it and being straight forward they use the A2A as the perfect excuse. I luckily quit before the process to go to business school but I have many colleagues that went through it and the whole thing was ridiculous. Everyone is only thinking of him/her self so there is a lot of back stabbing and the work environment is appalling. They pay a HUGE amount of importance to face time and I hated it. If anything someone that can get the work done in half the time should be rewarded higher than the analyst that stays up till very late to send an email so that everyone knows that he is in the office so late... compensation is good but is not very different from other banks. The training in NY is very cool tho. Also I was working in Europe and the American mentality doesn't really work here the same way.