AECOM Reviews

Current Employee – been working at AECOM full-time

Pros – Very good Work enviroment
Healthy Work Culture
Stable Job

Cons – Hard to climb the ladder
Pay increase small Per AN

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at AECOM full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Possibilities to work on interesting projects

Cons – Poor reward for hard work and achievements

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at AECOM full-time for more than a year

Pros – Many interesting companies taken over with some great people to work with, interesting projects and clients of previous companies, large projects both deep and broad, good working environment.

Cons – Complex systems that were region-blind, moderate to low salary, too many silos between take-over companies developed with staged-in transitions that made cooperation and business development complex and messy.

Advice to Senior Management – Stop buying companies without integrating them properly, take time to nurture systems and develop them, spend less on advertising, promotion and PR and more on quality staff.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at AECOM full-time for less than a year

Pros – not a lot poitive I have to say about a company like this

Cons – Absolutly no loyalty to employees. No thought as to the difficulty it places on people who quit a good job to work for them and then sack them with no entitlements.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at AECOM full-time for more than a year

Pros – Professional staff are friendly and likeable,

Cons – So many to list. Pay is ok but staff retention is awful, there is no explanation for redundancies and no focus on trying to help people keep their jobs. The business double accounts and charges clients for hours you have worked but doesn't pay you for the hours you've worked. Double standards and litle to no quality senior level management.

Lots of nice brochures on how AECOM is a people driven company and they strive for Excellence but very little evidence of this at a local level. Large amounts of red tape and meetings which focus on telling people why they are doing poorly rather than trying to support people.

Advice to Senior Management – Senior Manamgent is too focused on the share price and profits to see what is right before their noses. Stop aquiring and ruining good small businesses and focus on key areas that AECOM might look to suceed in.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at AECOM part-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Excellent and friendly staff who all work extremely hard for this company. Have enjoyed all my years working for AECOM but mainly due to the people I have worked with. Please keep your good staff.

Cons – Noticed that part-time and staff with longish levels of service are the first to go when the company is in trouble and they need to "re-organise". Can be told in one week that they don't want a particular position to reduce their hours because of the workload and then in the next that position can be made redundant - not sure what kind of message that sends to employees. Low morale with staff not feeling their jobs are secure.
AECOM is very US driven with processes and procedures being handed down to companies they buy out - not one shoe fits all yet that's how they run their projects.
AECOM has lost clients due to their some of their procedures, and engineering staff are left to do all admin work when there are lots of capable admin staff who could help them immensely yet can't due to the fact engineers are the ones who have to do it.

Advice to Senior Management – Engineers are not admin and support staff - they should be out doing the work, not completing mountains of paperwork. Recruit good admin support to assist engineers and keep them - don't make them redundant first when there are lots of middle to higher management who continually "work from home", but yet still can't approve something because they are not in the office.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at AECOM full-time for more than a year

Pros – Some wonderful, talented colleagues who are passionate about and highly committed to what they do.
A great mix of staff from all over the world which brings a range of opinions, cultures and experiences to the working environment.

Cons – As the organisation grew, the positive and proactive mood changed dramatically. A lack of independence and enhanced control from the US has turned the local region into a bureaucratic sheep.
Very poor integration strategies with the smaller companies which AECOM purchased, leading to further discord.
Very clear that being 'friends' and spending time socially with management was key to longevity and success in this particular office.
This was further evidenced by unprofessional, inappropriate and downright unacceptable behaviour in the office by certain key area leaders which went unnoticed and unaddressed due to their close personal relationships with management. As such, no recourse for staff who had issue with this.
No career opportunities for the support/administrative services and poor remuneration. Despite working extremely hard, going beyond targets and having a good reputation and support of many staff, my own remuneration, and that of my team, was kept stagnant due to the greed of my manager.
A lack of people management training for those leading teams. No accountability in this regard either - in a team where 6 out of 8 team members were turned over in a year, I would have thought some alarm bells might ring and some examination of that team might be worthwhile.
Some inexplicable business processes and decisions lead to a number of morale lows throughout my two years there.
Such a shame that a company with a large collection of such fantastic and skilled employees turned into a toxic and unhealthy environment for people like myself and others who unfortunately were in the wrong team at the wrong time.

Advice to Senior Management – No advice to management - they should be spilled and refilled with a fresh batch who may still possess ethics, professionalism and unbiased business sense.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at AECOM full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Opportunity to work on large projects. Have worked with some good people.

Cons – Conflict of interest galore. For example: environmental engineers working side-by-side with mining / oil & gas engineers; the environmental engineers being engaged to provide INDEPENDENT reviews and assessments on the environmental impacts of coal seam gas (i.e. fracking), while their colleagues are separately engaged by oil & gas companies to extract said coal seam gas.

So many processes, so much red tape, very bureaucratic.

Low, low morale. I do not know a single person I work with who likes AECOM, or who could say that they like working for AECOM.

No soul.

Impersonal management. There are no meaningful meetings with upper management, no one is approachable, there is no communication down the chain which is honest and frank. There is no accountability amongst management

No thanks, no reward. There is an expectation from upper management to 'do more with less', while not bringing anything to the table themselves.

False global opportunities for employees. The regions don't know each other, they very rarely deal with each other, and on even rarer occasions are transfers actually granted between different regions for existing employees.

Very American-centric culture and correspondence, despite doing most of their business outside of the US.

Advice to Senior Management – Own up!

Own up to making decisions that affect your employees. Inform your employees of the goings on as though they were human beings and had an intelligence level greater than a tomato.

The whole of the Australia and New Zealand business (around 4,000 people) has just been told that there will be no yearly pay review this year, with many of our employee benefits and rewards cancelled, while we have had to say goodbye to a few hundred colleagues who have just been retrenched (just in time for Christmas). NOT ONE person or group of people has owned up to these decisions, stating only the infamous line "the decision has been made"......made by who? The blame always deferred upwards, by nameless, faceless, cowards.

Also, as advice to AECOM's management, please realise that your employees who are doing the work, delivering projects and making the revenue, don't actually care what the share price is, or how much profit the company as a whole makes. We want to be rewarded for our individual efforts and want to work for a company that cares about more than just the bottom line.

I am voting with my feet.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at AECOM full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – met some good people and made some great friends -
but they have all left to join rival companies

Cons – where do i start:
so many of my colleagues are leaving. all of the senior HR staff in Brisbane have left in the last year and not one of the environment leadership team remains. they all give the same reason for their resignation - their manager. yet the senior business leaders do nothing to address the problem except for rewarding the poorly performing managers with promotions and large pay raises.

staff retention used to be a metric that we were assessed on but not any more. it clearly helps to have friends in the right places.

Advice to Senior Management – listen to the junior and mid-level staff. whole teams do not leave for no reason. if you keep on rewarding incompetent managers there will be no one left to do the work

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at AECOM full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – The pay is good. Some travel is possible. The company pretends to care about it's staff

Cons – It's very management top heavy with most of those managers being in place as a last man standing. Innovation and free speach are not welcome and whistle blowers are forced out of the company.

Advice to Senior Management – Scrap all the middle management layers. Have real staff consultation more than just annual surveys. Act rather than post slogans everywhere.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company