Pros
You will get to work on a variety of work. The office leadership at the Champaign Simulation Center is good to work with. They seem to be on top of things and know their employees. You will be given ownership of a project and you make your own decisions. Champaign-Urbana is a great place to live and raise a family. Has an open office culture and people are pretty friendly with one another. Opportunities for mentoring younger workers. Also can receive mentorship from more experienced workers. You can probably make an adequate paycheck. If living in a calm, family-oriented area is important to you, this would not be a horrible place to work. Understand though that it will take you your entire career to *possibly* make a healthy paycheck. The Champaign Simulation Center is a good place to work. I have a positive outlook for it. The company as a whole is wandering right now. Very cyclic. But the CSC is a decent place of employment. This is where it's at. At least in my case, I would burn out really quickly if I had to work in Peoria. You would be one of 100,000 small cogs in the dimly lit cubicle machine.
Cons
Heavy bureaucracy. Structure of the upper leadership of the company is very bloated and superfluous. It was impossible to keep track of who all of the supervisors were. It was not entirely clear what half of them even did. They were just "chief directing supervisor of supervising the undersecretary to the assistant manager of analytics." EVERYTHING had an acronym, and the acronyms changed every month. Main hub of the company seems to be a swiftly tilting ship. Absolutely no stability. I think I worked for three different divisions in the course of three or so months. "Diversity" was valued over competence. I come from a pretty diverse family (father born in Polynesia, have black, Japanese, Filipino, Cherokee relatives). I have lived in a number of places in the US and Asia. I would consider myself somewhat liberal in social matters. But I still expect higher leadership to actually know what is going on, not just be a good face to look at. I'm not sure I saw that here. Very little motivation to work for the cause of the company as a whole. You have a 50-50 chance of being laid off no matter what happens, so it's not like the employees actually feel Caterpillar has their back. Pay is not amazing. It's okay. You will not be poor. But you will have to value location over paycheck. I know of a good number of people who leave Caterpillar just because the pay does not overcome the deep bureaucracy and tumultuous position of the company. When I can walk away and earn $25k more in a similar real estate market, it takes a lot of loyalty to a group of nameless CEO/Vice Presidents in order for me to stay. Highly educated people in the tech industry rarely are that desperate for a job.