Pros
Was at the place for several years. Good location, pretty easy to get to and plenty of places to escape to nearby. There are some genuinely good people as can be expected of a large company. After work drinks and socials were fun. As many in the events world will tell you, if you don't have much experience you'll learn a lot about being self sufficient and always "going the extra mile" at IQPC (whether you want to or not). You'll at least appreciate your next role a lot more!
Kontras
Everything is built around a soulless sales culture that prioritizes sponsorship deals over the quality of events or any kind of long-term customer/client or employee care. Often things are sold to sponsors without any idea as to how to deliver on them and often little effort to deliver. Many events are run on the cheap in dingy outdated venues with expenses cut back to the maximum. Event calendars are treated like a sweatshop process with producers being given too many conferences all at once and made to churn out uncreative carbon-copy campaigns. Sometimes office politics gets out of hand between departments and global offices. For example our MD was terrified that the new digital events department was going to appropriate a lot of the traditional business revenue so the team were told not to help the digital staff and even sabotage their efforts when they could (which of course would only really mean lost revenue for the whole company). Never seemed a healthy way to run a business! Sadly there is also a long embedded culture of bullying, harassment and backstabbing, including senior event management, which is treated like an open secret among staff internally. Jobs constantly threatened if targets aren't hit. Pay is low for most and expectations are far beyond normal for those doing the ground work leading to a stressful environment that many people leave fairly quickly. Oh, and mice. Live ones and dead ones, take your pick. So you always run the risk of finding one on your desk in the morning, as has happened to some!
