Several sites and lines, but very low resources compared to that. There are more packaging lines than QA, Validation or Engineering resources. Yet many lines are busy and involved in NPI projects and line upgrades constantly.
One can learn a lot, but partly because an employee is thrown into deep waters, barely finished their training they are facing clients and working in serious GMP-relevant tasks. Learning is through negative feedback and performance improvement plans.
Driving change can be quick but improvements can be reverted very quickly if it gives any little financial profit to the company. This also means that employees are micromanaged from levels above, SME work is made difficult by company-political and financial decisions. At the same time, some quality-thinking driven decisions are not commeasure to the risk, or not handling the root cause, adding extra workload to teams already very busy. I think a Lean Quality approach would be very beneficial all over the processes.
People pull together, but partly because there is crisis situation very frequently. Stress levels are high all over board.
You can work with a lot of big pharma clients, but many tend to be unhappy on the meetings as they expect team members dedicated to clients/project, whereas in reality the work is much more chaotic and fire-fighting driven.
Informal hierarchy greatly outweighs formal hierarchy, and some people (in hope for career advances) operate in what I would call "cold war secret service model", reporting people to senior managers for tiny misalignments with the line dictated by senior managers. Flexibility is great towards the company, but much less towards the employee. In return you are expected to smile and enjoy your work life there.
It is like the busiest project week in big pharma, but here it is every day. You cannot plan your day, week, month. People are sometimes cancelling their holidays abroad due to project pressures.
Due to the approach of senior management, employees are pushed into blamegames. Any GMP related task is performed under major time pressure. Everyone is happy when a task is closed, then everyone is pointing to the person/team that was put under pressure, once something goes wrong or auditor isn't happy. People reviewing and approving documents take zero responsibility for the content, it's all on the Author (who was potentially typing up a quick fix at 8PM or later, as expected by senior management as a default dedication to the company).