Pros
Large company with diverse products and services within defense sphere. Strong financial performance, huge potential to grow business through integration and transparency of business areas, some promotability and career path opportunities if willing to relocate, great at keeping business hard resources up to date.
Cons
Top level leadership is lacking a consistent vision or unable to communicate it effectively other than through cliche mantras and taglines that often appear contradictory to current business practices and not grounded in reality. The broad mantras have no actionable components for each business unit, so we have core values and taglines for the sake of having core values and taglines. This is standard fare at BAE, doing things so that we can say that we do them but not using the tools and metrics for positive action. Training and other forms of employee investment are non-existent. Business will not invest in its employees nor will it develop consistent processes for career path management at all levels. Each location (aside from key corporate centers) is like living on an island without real awareness of what other business areas do. Not a team-oriented organization beyond local operations boundaries leading to a warlord management mentality that manages to numbers only with little concern or sincere attention to the human resources that make the business successful in-spite of itself. Often times decisions are made "on paper" without consultation of site-level or business area stakeholders resulting in funding cuts and labor utilization pressures to extremely lean remote locations while keeping "bloated" corporate center budgets in tact. Very bureacratic with key concerns and threats often taking an "act of god" to resolve. The company abandoned its "employer of choice" objective when it couldn't deliver in that arena. Attrition has been extremely high for that past 4-5 years with many employees leaving due to low job satisfaction and discontent from being so far removed from the corporate monolith.