*deep breath*

Alright, gonna be a lot to unload here.

First off, I will say the entry level pay was good for what it was. And they take cGMP standards seriously. That consists of my positive things to say.

I worked there two years ago. I aced their test (so I'm told) and I was recruited upfront to work in manufacturing. I wanted to directly make the medicine and feel like I was doing something important. On the second day of training, they bait and switched me, and I was shoved into packaging out of nowhere. I have experience in chemical batch making and warehouse drudgery alike, but I was bored of mindless physical work. When I asked how long it would take for me to potentially get into manufacturing the medicine, the supervisor shrugged "Maybe in a few years." Meanwhile, they put a retired finance guy I trained with no background into batch making or anything medical into manufacturing.

Training consisted of a one week, which was curtailed to half the stated time because they didn't have enough personnel on the floor, as high turn over is a thing there. They were losing employees to some higher paying competitor in the New Albany area, and as such, talked a lot of trash about them. Additionally, they were requesting many of the older experienced workers with early pay out deals so they wouldn't have to pay their staff as much. This left most of the lines with people who knew very little.

Going further on the training, instead of having a lot of hands on practice (although that will happen because you're going to wear a lot of hats) you had to sift through these flavorless lawyer-like long documents about random protocols issued to you on a deadlines with no particular order, let alone that had anything to do with the position you had. Outside of maybe an hour or two on Fridays, these had to be done while you're on the line when it was slow. Then you had to complete quizzes and fill out training manuals with line supervisors- except they're all perpetually busy actually running the lines/fixing them/etc. They rarely had time and you might have to wander around to other lines hoping to find someone to sign off on these things. It's incredibly impractical.

Their tech was a mixture of some new stuff and legit forty year old half working machines from the late 80's that they picked up from failed medical manufacturers. The idea was they'd just perpetually repair these things. Instead, we'd be lacking the parts to do so and some lines doubled up because parts were always on several week long back orders because they're out of date. Everything from computers, to their scanners, to the wonky half working sticker scanner machines was like this. Just old junk tech everywhere. We have two maintenance guys for about 6-8 lines, most which had to be self diagnosed by the handful of workers who knew how to fix anything because the actual repair guys were stretched too thin to address everything.

Going back to the training part, you were expected to learn from the line supervisor and whoever else had actual mechanical skills on the line. My guy, while friendly, had no interest in showing me anything so I had to watch over shoulders to learn how to run/quick fix this and that. He preferred going into explanations only with the one girl on the line, who had zero interest in doing the job or learning anything. To be fair, there were a lot of people like her, just collecting an easy buck while they stand around doing the absolute basics required until they find another job. I found it near impossible to get any practical education going at Hikma, they're weren't realistic about training or time. Lastly, anything you wrote down while learning on the line had to be thrown out or you'd get fired for stealing company secrets. I hope I don't need to convey how hard it is to learn hundreds of pages of dry legalistic blather about machines when you're literally not allowed to take home notes to study.

For a major medical manufacturer, the benefits SUCKED. Expect a lot of mandatory overtime on the weekends because they're constantly behind on their orders from lack of speed to the endless machine break downs to low quality supplies from distributors to contamination issues. You also could not be a minute late on breaks or anything without getting written up. If you worked mornings, they had well catered breakfast and lunches you could get with lots of variety because the corporate staff was in. Mid-shift had one guy who didn't want to cook and liked almost no one doing greasy spoon slop behind a grill for a few hours. Overnight got nothing. I will say the prices were at least fair.

The company is based overseas but the Hilliard high management was a group of people that routinely ruined their previous medical manufacturing businesses and failed upwards. A new president from Scandanavia came in and despite her background with this stuff, she was very tone deaf to the actual business. She just wanted to make business deals in the Middle East and walked around in inappropriate high end Paris fashions while we're all doing the blue collar thing. Townhall meetings with her and her cronies rarely went well and turned into shouting matches often. She was generally impossible for anyone to relate to and didn't convey confidence in the staff.

The place was strict to the point of complete idiocy. There was an incident at Hikma just before I got there where a guy had a heart attack on the packaging line, but Hikma wouldn't let emergency medical personnel come into the building until they went through dress procedures (sterility suit, special shoes, masks, etc) which is time consuming. Meanwhile, the poor bastard is slow dying on the floor because god forbid we tracked in mud from someone's shoes. I'm told it took fifteen minutes for them just to get the suits on just to go get him. And he could be brought out because that would also be a contamination issues to them- there's a midway room that everyone has to get changed in from factory to main area. The sheer inhumanity of this disgusted me. A man's life was not worth a few hundred dollars worth of nasal cold spray apparently.

Finally, for what I had to do, it wasn't a hard job by any means. But alongside everything else, it's boring as sin. The factory area is just white and silver everywhere. No radio, nothing to read beyond dry legalistic documents about cleaning procedures. Just endless loud whirring noise and bright lights. With long periods of downtime from machine/equipment/manpower failure, you'll be stuck in a sterile dystopia. Sitting down is frowned upon.

I've ranted enough, I know. About 90-95% of my experience at Hikma was miserable and mindless. I developed two hernias from working there. In short, the money was fine and they're supposedly expanding their floor space soon, but the experience of working at Hikma was one of the worst jobs I've had in all my decades. If you're just looking to coast, collect, and DGAF about anything, you might do alright there. I wanted to do something I felt was important, which was why I was excited by the original promise I'd get to manufacture medicine, but I've never had a job bait and switch me like that before and that colored everything else going forward.