About the training process, if you are from outside NY or Washington D.C., and cant really do a good commute, you'll be put in a hotel. FDM pays for the hotel, and you pay the taxes. I wasn't really ever sure how this works, but it ends up the FDM pays your hotel like they're paying you. So while you're only making 13.50 an hour, your being taxed a good 30% of your take home pay and the hotel costs $1000 a month, each room is $2000 for the two occupants (you will have a roommate). This is called a fringe benefit and some of my peers were really upset about this. If you have a family and bills to pay, although you'll get a good job later, you'll have a very difficult time while you're in training. The New York hotel is lacking in a lot of ways. 3 bathrooms per floor, so sharing them with 40 other people, and 1 kitchen per floor. No storage space to cook your own food. The D.C. hotel is a lot better, almost like a suite where you share one bathroom and kitchen with two rooms, and the hotel provides dinner a couple nights a week. If you are given a choice go with the DC office.
About the structure, the account managers and the trainers/training staff seem to have really bad disconnect. Very little communication between the two about how someone is doing, and trying to get all the trainees jobs.
Now, this is my experience and doesnt apply to most everyone who goes through the FDM Process. All of my classmates got positions, so this is from my experience. I went through the entire training at FDM, and had interviews with 3 different clients. This is an extremely low amount. No one was able to tell me why I was not getting interviews, not the account managers or the director of the north American training. I believe it boiled down to my degree, which is the main thing of this review:
If you have a degree in Computer Science, Finance, Business, or similar fields, go for FDM if you want to get into the IT field easily. If you don't, I highly don't recommend it.
My professors loved me, and always continued to wonder why I wasn't getting inteviews as my collegues were. I was given an award while in training, passed all of my classes, and never had a bad attendance. Yet I was hired in because of the way FDM promotes their recuiters to account managers (the recruiters become account managers after x amount of people are recruited), even though my background would not get me a position with one of their clients. There was also a problem with FDM treats their products (which is their consultants). They have tiers of people, and it goes like this:
Females
Veterans
anybody else
They pride themselves in promoting women in tech, yet they do so at the determent to everyone else. I had a female in my class who failed 4 classes, came to work pretty hung over on mondays, who regularly fell asleep in class, and came into work an hour late on several occasions. Yet aside from this she not only had more interviews than I, but was placed with a client. Had this been a male, they would have been fired. Yet because she was female, and they pride themselves in women in tech, she was given a job.
I could go on about the descrepancies of how non-vet males are lower on the scale than vets or females.
