Atkins reviews

There are some brilliant people working under very mediocre management practices. Overall, the organisation lacks a coherent vision and strategy. Senior management have no visibility on clients, sectors or even what is keeping the staff busy. Too much emphasis on billable time (‘productivity’) means staff are motivated to keep themselves billable without much thought on future business direction. Business development is often ignored and is seen as a ‘necessary evil’. As a result, Atkins usually ends up with contracts that competitors don’t want. Approach to project management is that PM time is seen as an unnecessary overhead and therefore, tech staff are asked to juggle PMing with technical delivery. It might work on small jobs but on large projects, it usually leads to project failures and losses. Ad hoc management is very much in vogue and perhaps only the fire department can teach you better fire-fighting skills. Staff reward and recognition is non-existent. Salary reviews are pretty much opaque and grade promotions are inconsistent with any logic or reason. There is a lot of unwritten rules around chartership/professional accreditation and they are seldom consistent. Salaries are sub-par with industry standards and only way to secure a substantial salary hike is to get another job offer from a competitor and hope for a counter-offer, at which point, you might as well decide to leave.

There is very little variety of projects on offer within the Aerospace market, largely owing to the slump in the industry overall. As a result, tasks are increasingly repetitive and dull, and largely qualify as contracting work as opposed to high value consultancy. Overwhelming stress is placed on submitting correct timesheets and maintaining high productivity. In my experience, should you be struggling with either of these, you will have to answer for yourself to a resource manager, your technical lead and/or project manager. As a consultancy, profits are important, but this should not come at the expense of developing the individual and striving to progress careers. Performance Development Reviews are merely tickbox exercises with meaningless high level objectives that are not personalised nor take into account the ambitions of individuals. Although it is a large company with many disciplines, it can be almost impossible to transfer elsewhere or try a new field- each division is effectively separate from each other. This can mean that you are pigeon-holed into one department from the start. There is an outdated corporate structure in place at the top, which favours redundancies and office closures (both of which occurred during my time at the company). There is a disconnect between senior decision makers and employees, which makes you feel powerless within the company. There is a distinct lack of shared strategy and honest communication with employees, and even more worrying, there are questionable ethics within the company. Its parent company is currently embroiled in ongoing bribery and corruption investigations. There is a lack of gender, racial and disability equality within the division (with the exception of the administration team). The office atmosphere is very formal, and most people are quite reserved.