Mott MacDonald reviews

-Relatively poor pay by industry standards -Poor progression, and progression seems to depend entirely on your relationship with your team leader / line manager. You can be an outstanding technical expert or project manager, but if you aren't their friend, it seems like you'll go nowhere. -Poor communication between teams -Lack of time codes for mandatory activities, like divisional meetings -A lot of red tape when attempting to win work -Huge variations in quality of life between teams/units/divisions- some are very flexible, and respect your personal life, others expect regular unpaid overtime and deny leave -Though on paper the company is employee owned, share ownership is extremely opaque, and only available to quite senior staff. Non-shareholders are very much kept in the dark. As far as I know, no junior staff own shares. -Strong push to "get back into the office" even though many staff have been home-working even before the pandemic. Push to return to office has not been justified with anything except vague platitudes about culture. -Fairly poor employee retention, linked to issues raised above

I don't even know where to begin. They hired 3 graduates at a time when the entire department consisted of around 20 people which is a substantial workforce increase. Considering the fact they barely had any new work incoming and I wasn't in the 'main' acoustics office, instead based in Croydon, meant I was left without any work. I was in a never-ending loop asking for work and then being pied off by management as there was "nothing to do". On the very rare occasion there was work to do, I was given a word document to spell-check. Yep, fresh off a 4 year specialised acoustics degree and I was being given word documents to format, that should be the admin part of a wider technical task. I can recall probably 6 spell-check/formatting jobs I completed, so that equated to roughly 1 task given every month, which would take 2-hours max if you dragged it out. This leads me on to the timecode system. Every single minute of your day needs to be allocated to a chargeable project. If you have a drink, a chat or do some basic admin, well tough luck you need to charge that to a project. In my situation this became a big issue, as I had no work to do and therefore nothing to charge. If you don't charge to a project, you don't get paid. I was told in round about ways by management to charge my time to HS2 even when I was not completing any work related to HS2 (only ever in calls, never in emails or messages). I was essentially told to lie about the work I was doing on a public infrastructure project funded by taxpayer money. I couldn't speak up about this at the time as the meagre 29k salary they pay barely covers living in London, so I could not risk a disciplinary or dismissal during my probation period with little to no savings. Further to that, I could not blame management as I had no evidence and they would have wiped their hands of me in an instant. I've never been treated with such disdain before and I was kicking myself that I took this job over the other offers I had, until I thankfully managed to move to a much better company. If you have the choice, do not work for this team, you will not gain or learn anything.