Pros
a fantastic group of people work in Virgin's head office in Bowen Hills The staff travel benefits are good but there is a tendency for people to overstate the value of this benefit.
Cons
Be very cautious about accepting a role at Virgin. I acknowledge that the airline business presents as being very attractive to virtually everyone under 40 but there are some inherent problems at Virgin which won't be remedied anytime soon. Virgin has been unprofitable for many years and has been reliant on its deep pocketed and benevolent shareholders to continually tip money into it to keep it viable. This translates into a very meanfisted employer who is truly loathe to spend a cent on its staff. Significantly, pay rates for non EBA staff (ie virtually everyone at head office) is very poor and well below market rates. Virgin believes the travel benefits and cache value of working for an iconic brand will cause you to look past this. The morale in head office right now is truly toxic, there have been a spate of recent redundancies (with more on the way) and the Virgin PR machine has been adept at keeping this from the media. Those that are left are required to increase their already stretched workload to absorb the reduction in the overall FTE count. The company invests next to nothing in critical aspects like succession planning and career development making it extremely difficult to move though the ranks for anyone with a hint of ambition. Virgin does has a bonus scheme but it is limited to those at level 3 and above and even then recent level 3 (manager level personnel) have been excluded. It gets paid every October and it is a closely guarded secret by the small minority who enjoy the spoils. This is one of the factors that has caused many staff in head office to seriously question their respective futures at the organisation. When the average person thinks about Virgin they think of a flat management structure and an equitable and fair bonus scheme - not so and this was perhaps the biggest surprise I found. The real issue is that to those outside of virgin it presents itself as such a mystical, fantastic place to work and while there are more people trying to land jobs at Virgin than there are leaving the company is under no pressure whatsoever to take any meaningful steps to improve morale. Many parts of the business have been discretely moved down to Sydney in recent years largely because the CEO is almost exclusively based in that part of the world. At a time when its rival Qantas is on the verge of announcing its 2nd best year of results ever (and second best in three years) while Virgin continues to post another loss you have to question the decisions that have been taken by management since 2010. Bear in mind too that Virgin is now majority owned by Chinese shareholders so don't confuse Richard Branson as the Chairman, his UK based group is now a minor shareholder (<10%) so his annual visits (always accompanied by much fanfare) are no more than a visit to one of his many franchise outlets.
