Pros
You get opportunities to work on different projects, as a roadway engineer I was exposed to join the marine team to help on port projects, and I was also given the change to help on aviation projects. Plus the medical insurance is a really good one. Nice coffee machine in the building I worked at, every month there are several occasions/meetings in which a good lunch is served.
Cons
NO major win on transportation projects in the past few years! Constantly being hated by lots of clients. I came from a small "legacy" company which got acquired by AECOM back in 2009, when we were brought on board, the language we heard most is "NOTHING CHANGES". In fact, EVERYTHING changes since we were moved into this boat. It seems like several acounting/finance people made rules at AECOM, our overhead rate was immediately bumped up to a crazy level. Almost all unfinished projects encountered budget issues. (1) Client became mad - because we could not complete the work as promised earlier (2) Project Managers became frustrated because of the hates from client and because of the stupidly high budget we asked every time after the merging, they WON"T be able to win anything at all (3) Project engineers/junior engineers/designers/drafters became very stressed too as on one hand they had to rush super heavily to have the work completed because of lower budget and on the other hand after the "left over" work from legacy company got drought, they got NO MORE stuff to work on. See this client - PM - engineer triangle, it is a LOSS LOSS LOSS scenario because of the stupidity from AECOM. And as most people know, yes, AECOM is growing bigger and bigger, but all they have are LEGACY company projects! NOTHING ON THEIR OWN. They seem so enjoyed or even addictive on merging other firms and crashing all previous work organization charts! As long as the stock price and quarterly financial report numbers look great, the upper management wanted to continue merging other firms rather than improving the firm's own engineering capability and the preference at clients. Neither does AECOM care about your own career development - the merging constantly happens every year or so, the person you report to or the district they assigned you keeps changing along with the merging. Anyway, you are an employee at AECOM, you are PURELY a number for those wall street financial clowns, they need you to keep their pocket full, they don't care about the traffic jam of a freeway, an old bridge structure of a flooded river, they want you to be there such that THEMSELVES look like NO.1 engineering firm in the world. So they can keep their profit and maintain live their luxurious life.
