Pros
- Some fantastic people, made a lot of friends over the years, a very social atmosphere in many offices. I have worked with some fantastic people, unfortunately there are not enough of the gifted people and numbers have dwindled in recent years. - Flexible working, depending on the business you work in and your grade, if you deliver you can more or less work your own hours. (this does not necessarily mean work life balance) - Very secure job. Historically rare for redundancies and well positioned to weather most economic storms (although are occurring currently within some businesses and further expected as part of SNC takeover) - Some great opportunities if you know where to look and if you are a corporate type of person able play the corporate game, (can also be a con for the wrong type of person) - Great opportunity to work on large, complex multi-discipline projects. - If you go in as or make it to associate life is pretty sweet. If you are v.ambitious and want to go beyond, life gets tough again.
Cons
A lot of senior managers who seem more concerned to appease the board to their own benefit and promotion while the under resourced mid to senior engineers struggle to deliver and are very poorly rewarded both financially but worse with promotion or recognition. You really have to fight to demonstrate worthiness of promotion and yet doesn't come, Atkins are very good at keeping your grades low while you perform well above them. Worse for foreign engineers and non chartered ones. The Atkins environment has changed a lot for the worse since Ewe became CEO (now ousted by SNC Lavalin), feels a lot more cut throat, all about making profits for those lucky shareholders. Since then, quality of available projects has really slipped as has the general standards. Very frustrating fighting to do deliver best quality of work we can and as such consistently doing too many hours because we cant actually deliver competitively and to quality like 5+ years ago. A note about the work-life balance, depends if you are driven or not, if you happy to float along and develop slowly you can achieve a very nice work-life balance but your progression will be the cost, ok if you are an associate level. Gender equality questionable in areas from what I hear.