+ The Associate role and experience itself is not useful unless you want to be an account manager in your next job. The frustrating part is that they constantly tell you that this is very valuable experience and preach "soft skills", but it is really self serving for the leadership because they don't want you to realize it is not.
+ One of the primary reasons the role is not useful is that it is not intellectually challenging or stimulating. It consists of primarily combing through LinkedIn to find people with certain job titles and connecting with them as well as cold calling people off of recruiting websites. These "skills" can be learned in a couple hours. So while the company's leadership and professional development team tries to advertise this job as similar to an analyst role in finance or consulting, it is more of a low level sales or recruiting role. The person that should work here is someone that prioritizes social life over their career as it is a fun place to work.
+ The mid-level employees such as managers and VPs are tasked with helping Associates with career development, but most of them have only ever worked at AlphaSights and aren't qualified to do so. I think they are sincere in their efforts, but just aren't qualified for this task.
+ Some of the clients are awful to deal with. The common thread I observed amongst the employees that stay at AlphaSights and go through the career path there is that they worship the clients as if they are these brilliant human beings. But this is far from the truth. They are by no means dumb, but aren't all that impressive. So in order to succeed and deal with them you need to worship them and think they are these gods of intellect.
