I work for Group 12...

[english girl]

I worked for Group 12 from 1999 - 2001 on the management trainee exchange programme. Most of the people I worked with were lovely, but I hated pretty much every second of the job. I mainly did it to get a US work visa for 18 months, and overall it was a great experience, but being an MT pretty much had no redeeming features.

I think one of the basic problems (apart from all of the obvious that has already been discussed here - crappy pay, slave-like hours, bad management ethic, shockingly out of date computer system, very dull work), is the fact that these are not graduate level jobs. When you recruit people who have a college degree they are usually going to have a degree of expectation regarding what the work will involve, promotion prospects, the ability to make decisions (apart from how to screw over the customer you don't have the right size car for...). Enterprise doesn't offer this at all. I think I was able to see it really quickly as I had already been working as a manager in publishing for 3 years before, so I had experience of a true graduate level job.

I just could never get excited about washing cars, picking people up and doing callbacks. Call me crazy...As soon as I got back to the UK and saw it was exactly like ERAC in the States, I quit. Since I did that 6 years ago my salary package has quadrupled. Enough said.