AECOM reviews

If you work in IT, polish up your resume. If you work as a design services professional, don't expect to be efficient or productive. There is seemingly zero understanding about how to, nor concern for, providing high quality technical infrastructure and support. Acceptable response time for software issues is days, not hours. If you do get support, their expertise ends at the typical Microsoft products. Do you use CAD? Make friends with your cube neighbor because you will be figuring a lot out together. Forget BIM... AECOM is years behind the competition in implementation and utilization. As a prior employee of a profitable, established and technologically advanced firm I watched AECOM slowly reduce our offices to an inefficient, incompetent and inconsequential mess. Before AECOM acquired our firm, our IT department actually generated revenue through the many extra technical services we provided to our clients! AECOM genuinely did not know what to do with that. They're clumsy accounting systems and staff truly did not have a way to integrate a "positive overhead" operating model. Within three years AECOM effectively smothered profits, quality and morale to near asphyxiation with their "management straitjacket". Thousands of amazing, experienced, intelligent and passionate people have left or been let go by this tragically inept corporation. Hundreds of clients have been lost. Acquisitions and downsizing seem to be what they do with the most competence.

I don't even know where to start. It has been simultaneously comforting and disturbing reading about fellow employees around the country wiith the same experiences. AECOM was built through acquisition of a wide variety of smaller firms, and it shows. Established names went away, and the replacement doesn't fill the void. Even people in my field are not really aware of AECOM, and if they are, it is with negative connotations. Combine this lack of recognition with high overhead costs due to a large, bloated executive management, and this serves to make us unable to compete with smaller more nimble organizations. As an employee, you need to be constantly worried about being laid off. I've stopped worrying and almost wish they would lay me off. The work has grown less interesting and fraught with burdensome amounts of administration. The answer to all woes is a form. Or, better, a series of forms and processes. This serves to prevent us in focusing on what our primary focus should be: our clients. I've realized for some time now that there really is no room for growth professionally or salary-wise. Pay increases have been at a minimal 1-3% annually, with very little management discretion. Local managers are told what they can do, and it's never much. All in all, there are many cons and few pros.