I was wondering why my position had such a high-turnover rate. From what I understood, the local office was previously 70+ but had dwindled down over the years to only about 20+. Well, I found out why and the cited reason (the economy slowdown) was only a fraction of the problem. I personally lasted only several months once I realized how toxic of an environment this workplace was. The largest problem is that workplace bullying is very much alive, fostered, and the bullies are admired and protected. This due to the fact that groups are left to aggressively grab at projects even from other groups. More skilled positions were likely bullied out through work starvation in order to protect the lesser skilled professionals that were in a higher rank that managed client accounts. They will often lie to you about the amount of backlog carried. They prefer to operate with only a small amount of backlog for client delivery turnaround, however that does lead to panic and insecurity of the future work. They live and die by the utilization rate and will have no reservations with layoffs for even the most skilled and senior professionals. I watched someone with 29 years of service get laid off after only 3 weeks without work. AECOM is the Wal-Mart of engineering and there is plenty of stress on professionals to sell their "project price points." Low project budgets lead to short contract turnaround which puts a lot of pressure on the professionals to deliver a product by working overtime and not clocking it. In fact, as a professional you are an exempt employee, the timecard application will not allow you to clock more than 40 hours per week. At the time of interviewing they made it appear that you would be traveling to strange and adventurous places and working on grand projects. All of that proved to be a half truth. If you were senior enough, had specialty skills, and had the right connections then maybe. However, it makes no sense to have someone in the US work in any project anywhere else in the world and you are competing against other professionals across 150 countries for those opportunities. All-in-all, it could have been a good opportunity if many things were different but, there were much more bad than good with the worst being the workplace bullying. No salary is worth enduring workplace bullying.Lastly, it is also ranked as the 7th worst place to work according to 24/7 Wall Street. so you can decide for yourself if this is the careerplace you want to be in.
