• Totally unethical company based on lies and corruption. How AECOM ever received an award for being ethical is incredible. Must have been by bribery.
• Constant harassment about billability (utilization), yet keep hiring more “business development managers” who have 0% billability.
• Threaten employees with redundancy due to their low billability whilst hiring new staff with same or similar skills.
• Culture of exclusion. Only group leaders and their inner circle deal with clients. People who actually work on the projects are kept in the background and don’t even meet the client. Groups have sub-groups such as “Project Delivery Group”, ”Leadership Group”, “Business Development Group”, “Client Relationship Group” and “Research Group” which consist of same select few individuals and exclude everyone else. Most group members don’t know the existence of the sub-groups. Only select individuals attend client functions, give presentations at professional meetings etc. Project Delivery Group treats itself to lunch at expensive restaurant for its “success in delivering projects” which were actually delivered by the people who worked on them. Complete insult.
• Group leader who bullied team members and was total jerk was promoted to Technical Director despite widespread complaints to management.
• Reward and recognition is based on favouritism rather than actual achievement. Awards given for totally trivial accomplishments like sending out a client survey, while real achievements are ignored.
• Unfair promotion process that is not based on merit or credentials.
• People taking credit for the work of others and getting promoted on that basis. Cutting and pasting of other people’s work into conference papers and presentations and making false claims on CPEng career episode reports is endorsed by management.
• Company is so paranoid that it has a social media policy to try and control anything negative on the internet. Surprised AECOM hasn’t managed to close down Glassdoor. Suspect it is behind all those five star ratings.
• Expectation to work significant extra hours without any additional pay or reward.
• Expectation to keep up to date with technical developments but AECOM won’t pay for attendance at conferences and seminars.
• Management pretends to care about employee satisfaction but does nothing about legitimate complaints.
• No privacy. People constantly picking up stuff on your desk, reading your e-mails on your monitor, stealing pens and reference materials.
• Americanisation at its worst.
