The aspect of my career that I enjoy the most is the ability to move around into different functions within the organization. I've been here at ACNielsen now about five years and during that time I started off in the finance department supporting the marketing function. And so I did that for about two-and-a-half to three years, and the company was really responsive in trying to address my needs to further my career. I ultimately wanted to get back into the marketing path, which is sort of my background and education. I thought the company was very flexible in allowing me to do that. I am now in marketing, and in my role in marketing I feel that if I decided to transition to another function—say into the sales organization or into the operations area—I think that flexibility is there. The company has been very open in allowing me to go in different paths, and I feel like I can do that in the future as well.

Marketing Director

At ACNielsen, we have many tools available to our associates to help us grow in our careers. Some of the informal tools that we have in place include the mentor program. Each associate is assigned a mentor that we are able to go and speak with. It's nice because it's somebody outside of your boss that you can ask questions to. Another one of the tools that we have are informal weekly meetings with our managers, which help us to see how we are doing in our jobs—how we are performing against the projects that we are currently working on. Of the more formalized processes that we go through, we have an ACNielsen University training program. What we get every year is a catalogue of all the classes that are available. We work with our managers to identify what the classes are that we need to take to best enhance our skill set development to help us perform the jobs that we are in right now, but also, to be successful in future jobs. We also have an annual goal setting process where every year we identify our goals for the position that we're currently in. We even have opportunities to look at the next position ahead to stretch some of our objectives into that next position so that we continue to grow and advance ourselves. So through the leveraging of all these tools, we have many, many ways that we can enhance our career growth at ACNielsen.

Account Director

Another thing I like very much about working at ACNielsen—they are very progressive and open to leading-edge technology. We're breaking ground in terms of learning more about UNIX, Java development, PL/SQL. There are a lot of things happening that are challenging to the team, but people are stepping up to it because it's new and it's interesting. It provides challenges that are welcome. People are always enthusiastically jumping into these things because it's new. I think they're motivated by the fact that we're leading edge. We go for the leading-edge tech. That leading-edge technology is something that is encouraged.

Senior Project Manager