LDP (Engineering Leadership Development Program) - Anonymous employee Textron Employee Review

Terms of employment: *You can not leave the program without getting fined, heavily. When you're first hired on you sign a repayment agreement stating that you will pay back your relocation package if you leave within a year. What's impossible to know at the time of signing is that this agreement is strategically designed to lock you in the company for no less than 4 years. Each year you will have to sign the same repayment agreement but the catch is Textron will make you sign the next year's before the prior one expires. With textron reserving the right to terminate your employment without reason or warning while still holding you accountable to the one year repayment period, you have to come up with a pretty good excuse for why you don't want to sign the next one. The only way to escape the overlapping agreements would be to either delay signing or to take the package and give it back immediately. Although this will soften your fine for quitting, it will not eradicate it entirely. Textron will make tax payments on your relocation after you receive your package, but these payments are differed. In the end if you decided that this job or company isn't right for you, at the very least you will be fined a few thousand dollars and at the worst a not so few thousand dollars. Work: As for the work itself, Textron is a slow moving company. You're effectively a year long intern. Textron is comprised mostly of long term projects. From my experience management typically doesn't want to give much responsibility to a recent grad on a project due to the fact that they're multi year long and the ldp we be gone in one. Most of my time at textron i had nothing to do with some occasional grunt work. Culture: Textron's companies are predominantly in aerospace and defense. These industries are notoriously volatile and a down market can cause considerable amount of pressure on a company's bottom line. During my time at textron every company I've been at has experienced significant reductions in headcount. This leaves the rest of the employees perpetually in fear of their jobs. People get very defensive if you try and take on work "owned" by someone else. All in all, its a pretty grim place to develop leadership and in my opinion a young ambitious recent grad's time would be much better invested elsewhere. I would not recommend this company or this job to a friend.