Nothing Golden about Golden Key
My review is twofold: It is partly a hands-off look at what this society offers students and partly a critique of how the business is operated. Hopefully, this review will be helpful to students considering membership, prospective employees, or corporate partners.
The organisation's real value lies within the student committees at each university that implement different projects to assist other students and their local communities. This only happens if there is active leadership at the university, though. The students do all the work. If you are a student at a university with an active Golden Key chapter – get involved. You can boost your CV by doing community service through the chapter, attending networking events, learning to compile your CV and apply for scholarships, making friends with other ambitious students, serve on the committee yourself so that you can write down your CV that you have leadership and soft skills, etc.
And regardless of what they say, even though you have life-long membership, there are no real benefits for alumni. If you are going to keep on reading your student emails after university is sent to you by a university society, you might find random invitations about events that aren't in your area or information about things to apply for that do not interest you or are not related to your field. The only time Golden Key membership might give you an advantage at an interview could be if you apply for a position at a company that has a positive impression of Golden Key. Most recruiters do not really care, and the majority do not know Golden Key exists. And those companies that are big enough actually have their own processes in place with some universities to obtain access to the top graduates.
Either way, this is more of a complaint about how the business is run.
Management at Golden Key SA and the USA and Australia has NO leadership skills. For a company that strives to teach leadership skills to students, the management of the company is the perfect example of everything that should not be done. The company is under-resourced, understaffed, utterly overworked (to the extent that in some countries it is seen as abusive and illegal), underpaid, using insufficient and archaic software and hardware systems, the backend is a disaster, there are no communication channels, no conflict resolution, inequitable spending of funds, and employees never see the perks they were promised etc. And nepotism is rife within management.
Management does not care about lower-level employees, and lends its ears to the lies of a select few, never really knowing what is going on inside the business. When trying to address concerns about outdated and failing business systems and processes, management retorts by saying the employees are just incompetent.
In fact, one manager lied about corporate relations for years, committing fraud in the process, and was then promoted. I have heard horror stories of management's utter incompetence from previous employees, university representatives, and previous corporate sponsors.
If you are a student considering signing up for Golden Key - you are welcome to do so knowing that you are paying to write on your CV you are one of the students in your course with the highest marks. This can be beneficial, as hopefully, that will give you an edge when applying for a job.
If you are looking for employment at Golden Key - stay away.