Nearly 8 Years ended with bad management and broken promises
Pros
There are some good business units within Jacobs. Jacobs has lots of opportunities as long as the business pipeline stays full. Lately, there has been lots of focus on engineering work, so they will have a demand for engineers.
Cons
Mediocre benefits, schizophrenic corporate execution, behaving like a small business, behaving like a "body shop" where people are a commodity asset, and senior management p*ssing in the wind and calling it rain are just some of the cons. In fairness, the company is currently experiencing a massive restructuring that may fix some of the issues. Jacobs Old was generally made of logo-ly integrated business units that had differing policies and benefits (depending on the cost base that was used during the work proposal). Jacobs New SEEMS to be aligning the business under some sort of vertical, but I don't know what the final product will look like. Executive management is attempting to engage with line level employees using emails and the company's blog capabilities on Jacobs Connect. JC was largely an attempt to preserve corporate IQ as personnel came and went from the company. Today, it is more like Facebook for the company, where the autocrats post about "whats going on" but few line level employees will engage in dialog that will produce results...and even fewer really care about "whats going on" in the trenches. Corporate values are under attack at Jacobs as the company has changed from three (People are our greatest asset, Growth is an imperative, We are Relationship Based) simple values to five more complex ones. In the new Jacobs, "People are the heart of our business". Great news, but people are no longer their greatest asset...and it shows. I had nearly 8 years with the company, but - in the end - was not valued by local management and allowed to leave. No one from management even said thank you or walked me out my last day. There wasn't even a check out form. I literally left whatever needed to be turned in at my desk and walked out at the end of the day (5PM). This isn't the only place where field management's execution of the corporate values are hit and miss. Jacobs is a largely safety based company (another value "(Jacobs) values stand on a culture of safety and integrity"), but local management at my facility consistently ignored problems that were dangerous to life (allowing water condensate to be stored in the walking path of unsecured, high draw power cords, allowing cords to be zip-tied to ceilings). Clearly not safe. Numerous SORs (a Jacob's safety thing) were completed documenting the issues and were ignored. Jacobs also values its people, but - again - examples of how it selected persons to keep and which to let go. To be fair, all of these cons were at my last assignment with the company. The other BU's that I worked in were not like this, only this one. I'm not sure if this is indicative of the direction other BU's are going or just this one.
