Pros
Reasonable salary, extensive learning and training opportunities (if you have the time after your 12 hour workday), consistent and reliable work pipeline which makes for a stable job. Not 1 single person was laid off nor were internships/new-hires turned down offers as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Regular wage increases are common as long as you are doing your job. Great healthcare/vision/dental/life insurance benefits. The main office rocks and makes the routine behind the scenes stuff of a job very easy. Good use and upkeep of technology for a large company, some computers get old and they will refuse to replace until you meet your years. Option of company phone available to almost all, some get iPads for field work, gear and PPE is well provided and they truly truly do care about safety on the job site.
Cons
Career Opportunities: Clark has a rather extensive network and several self-preform entities in which you can (sort-of) move around. The opportunity is definitely there you just need to consistently and clearly voice your interest so that when the time comes to move you around, the person slating your name for a project thinks of that. There are extensive learning resources; however, they rarely give you time to make use of them and often times you have to do this outside of work hours. This eats into other responsibilities and into free time. The learning experience very much turns into a "trial by fire" of being pushed to do things without any guidance or help and foments a very stressful work environment. Compensation & Benefits: Salary is good and very much a comfortable living wage but it is effectively low for the hours you work. Work is comprised of regular 10-12hr days with some 14hr days, many Saturdays. There is little care about worker well-being, the focus is 99.9% on getting the work and making profits and they will push you to your ends to meet that goal or plow right through you. Their form of thanking is in quarterly corporate videos or a free lunch here and there which does nothing to fix how long or hard you work. I don't mean to imply it should be extravagant but I have never found the thankfulness to be genuine but rather a "check the box" action my most managers. Vacation days are scarce and you don't even get every federal holiday off (MLK, president's). The holidays you do get sometimes you have to work on anyway (worked on Labor Day, New Years Eve this year), specially near project completion. The brunt of the work is always on the lowest level engineers and it shows in how high the turnover rate is. Culture & Values: In terms of culture and values I found a lot of talk but not a lot of walking the talk. There are frequent corporate messages about worker well-being and taking care of yourself, yet management rarely follows through with that. There is no teaching managers how to manage and many of them get there simply by time in the company rather than truly excelling at their job. HR does a wonderful job of teaching and enforcing good values (w/ regard to: safe work environment, respect, sexual harassment, inclusion & diversity) in trainings but I found this rarely follows through to job sites or smaller offices and only a small portion of the company is truly committed to making the company comfortable and inclusive to everyone. There is a terrible, terrible macho-man culture of being able to tough it out which is not helpful to anyone. They would get and keep much better employees if a culture of helping each other and working together was encouraged rather than the feeling of every man for themselves. Diversity & Inclusion: The construction industry is very antiquated and Clark is no exception. Again, HR does a great job of teaching good values but they rarely trickle down to the job sites. Corporate has unrolled a new diversity and inclusion program recently (told it was not BLM June 2020 related but I found that hard to believe) and they have definitely been making a concerted effort and have been making strides in the right direction. This also very rarely trickles down and is never enforced well on subcontractors who often make lewd, homophobic, and/or racist jokes and comments. Senior Management: Senior management is 50/50 and can either be great or the same brick and mortar which middle management is made of. Sometimes it feels like they are making an real effort to improve the company but other times it feels like they rarely stop and listen to employee concerns. Diversity is essentially inexistent in upper management roles and that helps nobody. Work/Life Balance: Again, work is comprised of regular 10-12hr days with some 14hr days, many Saturdays. You are expected to be alert basically 24/7 cause of any job site emergencies. Project transitions are huge gray areas in which people get caught working for multiple projects. Work consequently gets dumped on others because you are expected to give 100% of your time to any project you are on which is obviously not possible if you are on more than one.
