Pros
Connecting with clients and helping them feel confident and beautiful is definitely very rewarding. You get to learn a lot about makeup and skincare, and you get to positively impact people's lives. You also get free products in the form of monthly gratis. As SEC, it is your job to organize and distribute gratis. As SEC, you also gain good management/leadership experience. Working full-time as SEC gave me the business foundation I needed to get accepted into my MBA program. You work in close partnership with the Operations Manager, Beauty Manager, and General Manager (my Sephora was inside a JCPenney). There is pretty good opportunity to advance within Sephora. I began as a Product Consultant, and was promoted to Senior Education Consultant within 4 months. You build strong relationships with your co-workers and managers and they can give you valuable recommendations down the road.
Cons
This is a retail sales job. If you hate retail and customer service, you will not like working at Sephora. Yes, you get to be around makeup all day, but this job is a LOT more than just playing with makeup. Since SEC is part of the leadership team, this position can be very stressful at times. You are responsible for on-boarding and training all associates, delivery the monthly education agenda, and driving metrics such as Beauty Studio services, Beauty Insider registration, Love score, and of course, sales. Since this is a retail job, your schedule is going to be all over the place. Unless you have a fully flexible staff and a manager who sticks to a consistent schedule, you never know when you are going to be working until the schedule comes out. This makes it very hard to have a social life outside of work. You are always going to be working weekends, since those are the busiest days. At my location, if you wanted a day off, you needed to request it 3 entire weeks in advance. So if your friend invites you to hang out this weekend, forget it--you need to plan your life at least 3 weeks in advance. The biggest con is dealing with rude customers. People are often impatient when they have to wait for service, even when the store is extremely busy. Customers will get angry with you over high prices, even though you can't control price. They will argue over returns. They will abuse the sample system. They will ask you to do full-face makeovers and take up lots of your time without spending a dime in return. Another con is the fact that my location was inside a JCPenney. Working at SiJCP is different from working at a free-standing Sephora. At SiJCP locations, you are technically a JCPenney employee as your paycheck comes from JCPenney, not Sephora. Since our store was inside JCPenney, we were required to know what was going on outside of Sephora as well. We had customers ask us questions about JCP merchandise and sales all the time, and they got frustrated when we didn't know the answer. The BIGGEST con to working at an SiJCP is that you have to promote the JCPenney Credit Card, which they refer to as iCaps. Our manager was CONSTANTLY bugging us about getting iCaps. We had to ask every single customer, and if they said no, we had to try and convince them to apply. This was extremely frustrating, since most of our customer come to shop strictly at Sephora, and they don't care about JCPenney credit cards.