Lockheed Martin reviews

4.1

84% would recommend to a friend

(14,562 total reviews)
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James D. Taiclet

82% approve of CEO

73% positive business outlook

Lockheed Martin has an employee rating of 4.1 out of 5 stars, based on 14,562 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Lockheed Martin employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Aerospace & Defense industry (3.6 stars).

Reviews by job title

15K reviews
1.0
Oct 23, 2010
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Convenient location which resulted in a reasonable commute to work.

Cons

- The majority of the Lab Equipment in the Electrical Engineering lab was purchased in the 1970’s. In addition, there is no lab technician or lab manager to organize the lab and maintain the equipment due to budgetary reasons. - Engineers are not given the authority to make decisions or address road blocks. However, Engineers are held responsible for the assigned task by management. - Questionable practices in regard to charging of labor hours to government contracts. - Management refuses to write trip reports or inform the engineers of changes that affect requirements, schedules, or budgets. Engineers must call the customer to determine what changes management has agreed too. In regard to this problem one co-worker pointed out the fact that if a manager does not write it down the manager cannot be held responsible. - The small training budget is generally allocated to the recent college graduates. Long time employees in management positions will admit to never having completed a management training class. In addition, there is no budget or training program for mid level or senior level engineers. - The work is mainly low technology. Challenging high tech work is subcontracted out. - Insubordination issues by employees are not addressed by management in a timely manner. - Unknowingly, two different groups of people will be assigned the same task by the same manager thus duplicating effort. The result is overcharging the customer and over running the project budget. - Management ranks the employees. Rankings are generally dependent on management’s perception or familiarity with the employee as a result the employees at the bottom of the rankings are not necessarily the low performers. Low ranking employees are Involuntary terminated in staff reductions. - Personal vehicles are routinely vandalized in the parking lot. - Medical coverage is reduced by 10% on a yearly basis.

3.0
Apr 25, 2010
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- pretty good work/life balance (except for areas like testing/manufacturing, which require weekend and evening shifts). I work an average of 40 hrs/wk, with exceptions for known crunch times, and have yet to be penalized for not working overtime. I see managers and directors leave work early to pick up their kids. Results will vary with the area and program you're working in, though, and you definitely have to be willing to pitch in extra when things get busy. - reasonably easy to move around if you're a strong performer - great vacation: 3 weeks vacation, a holiday shutdown, and every other Friday off (if your workload permits). Altogether, it adds up to about 8 weeks off per year. If you put in legwork to find projects that are interesting, ask around to see who's good to work with and then go talk to those folks (and avoid managers known to be toxic), find at least a couple of people willing to mentor you, and perform well, I think you'll find the experience you're looking for.

Cons

- most programs are not cutting-edge or fast-moving. This means if you stay in one place for too long, you could fail to maintain or develop your skills (despite corporate mantras to "continue learning"). That is career suicide. So you have to frequently look for new experiences to keep you sharp. - on that note, technical challenges are lacking; there's a high dependency on building from heritage. that's low risk, but not really exciting or difficult. it amounts to busy-work. - it's difficult to be widely recognized as a high performer without entering one of the leadership development programs. These exist at several career levels, but I can see how NOT being in one can really hurt your progression here. - if you'd like to move to a smaller company eventually, being at Lockheed could make that difficult. You might become dependent on the processes LM has in place and fail in a smaller company; even if you're great, other companies will certainly fear that this is the case. - Even if varied experiences are easy to find, promotions have decreased in recent years. So you have to push harder for them. - yes, layoffs happen, but they happen everywhere. Make sure you're on a program that's funded.

5.0
Apr 10, 2010
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I did really like the overall experience, pay was great ($23.70/hour) + $3,300 for housing (paid the second week of work). You get to meet lots of very knowledgeable people, and you get to work on really fun projects which you wouldn't be able to work with in other companies (due to the nature of LM being a Defense Contractor). During this summer I even had the opportunity to participate in the LM Intern's Forum, which was held at Northfolk,VA and it was lots of fun. Three days at VA, got to see some really cool LM projects at LM's Lighthouse and got to meet really important people at LM.

Cons

If you are moving in from far away like I did, it can be a bit of a pain to find affordable housing primarily because even though LM will give you $3,300 (-taxes) to pay for housing it only does this AFTER you are already working for two weeks. I don't know about the rest of you, but most college students I know including myself dont have $1,000+ sitting on the bank waiting to be used. I had to find about $2,000 in order to be able to pay for my flight to Maryland, and the advanced 1 month rent I had to pay at the Extended Stay Hotel in which I stayed for the summer, all this plus food! That almost makes me not able to go participate in this great internship. I believe Lockheed's HR need to look into this and arrange for housing for the interns themselves, like many other internships do.

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