What it does: Cognizant is an American multinational IT service and consulting company, operating offshore software R&D and outsourcing.
Mission: We engineer modern businesses to improve everyday life.
Best known for: Being the go-to IT services provider for many Fortune 500 companies.
Size & presence: The company has 318,400 employees globally, of which over 150,000 are in India.
The good bits: By working at Cognizant, you’ll have the opportunity to work with some of the world’s biggest companies.
The not-so-good bits: Not much opportunity for career advancement in the company.
Cognizant’s beginning started in the 1990s as Dun & Bradstreet Satyam Software (DBSS). Originally an IT department at Dun & Bradstreet, it eventually grew large enough to become a separate entity and soon afterward became a large conglomerate that focuses not only on providing IT services but also business process outsourcing and consultancy.
Cognizant has acquired many IT services and consulting companies over the years across the world. Many of its most recent acquisitions in the 2020s are companies operating in DevOps, machine learning, and cloud computing — suggesting that the company is interested in expanding its services in such directions.
Due to its nature as a B2B IT services and consultancy company, Cognizant’s employees get a lot of chances to experience working with many different clients, with some of them being industry leaders. Of course, there are some challenges when working with this model; many points out the difficulties coordinating with other team members or clients working in different time zones.
However, most of their past and current employees, according to Glassdoor reviews, do mention that there aren’t many opportunities for growth. Despite this, the company does offer many learning resources for its employees and has one of the most flexible working arrangements possible considering its industry.
Like other companies, Cognizant offers several opportunities to do an internship in their company. Of course, these opportunities are generally open only for college or university students who are still studying in their educational institutions.
As for full-time positions, Cognizant in the U.S. doesn’t really have specific career programs intended for recent college or university graduates. However, they always have openings for entry-level positions available year-round for roles such as Business Analyst, Web Developer, and Data Engineer.
The recruitment process at Cognizant typically goes similarly as it does in most companies. First, you’ll have to submit an application to their website. Then, if you are shortlisted, Cognizant’s hiring team would reach out to you and invite you to do an online assessment.
What this assessment process looks like depends a lot on the role you’re applying for. If you’re applying for an IT role, you can bet that there will be a lot of scenario-based assessments about how to solve business problems using IT solutions. Of course, it’s also possible that you may have to deal with coding assignments as well.
Aside from assessments testing your skills, you’ll also have to deal with several rounds of interviews.
The base pay that you could receive as an intern at Cognizant varies widely. Perhaps this difference is due to the fact that it’s possible that you will be hired by Cognizant to work for a client, versus working in Cognizant as an intern. The range of pay an intern could receive from working in Cognizant is around $30,000-$120,000 per year.
As for entry-level positions, the role you take up at Cognizant would reflect the difference in pay. For example, a Business Analyst could earn around $70,000-$80,000 per year, while a Software Engineer could earn between $80,000-$90,000 per year.
Cognizant’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) contributions fall into several programs. One of them is Cognizant Outreach, where its employees are given the opportunity to volunteer on two major focuses for Cognizant’s charitable initiatives: Supporting inclusion in tech and increasing the use of technology for good.
Cognizant was recently named in an investigative report into poor working conditions by the media outlet The Verge in February 2019. It relates to the company’s contract with Facebook to moderate content for the site. Contractors who worked in Cognizant’s office in Phoenix, Arizona reported, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, and sexual intercourse in the workplace, and feared retaliation from terminated workers who threatened to harm them.