Pros
Massive company makes for opportunities for mobility. If you want to move, it's typically a transfer, and there are offices everywhere. Once you are established, and have working relationships with people, you can work across any project seamlessly. The benefits are competitive, though vacation time is less than you'll find with other companies. They have every process figured out, and there is a form for it. They have a great brand, great marketing, and good company image. They are really good at marketing. IT service is world class. Phone, computer, internet issues are handled fairly quickly, and IT services can remote in to your computer to fix any problem. You go get a coffee, by the time you return, your problem is solved. Proposal system and resumes are accessible quickly and professionally across the company. It is reasonably easy to find specialists within the company to work on projects. In house legal department is available to review non-standard contracts, and provide legal advice on day-to-day operations. There are some awesome people in the company, and people with serious depth of design knowledge and skills. Once you find them, they are indispensable.
Cons
One of the company goals is to be a Top 10 Design Firm. After careful inspection, I found out that their goal is to be top 10 in sheer mass. (As opposed to top 10 in client satisfaction, or employee satisfaction, or quality, or ?). It says a lot about the company. Like many aspiring top 10 firms, the company grows through acquisition. The key to successful transition of smaller companies is to turn them into individual businesses (or profit centers) within a larger company. Everyone retains their bosses, and things seem to keep moving 'the way they've always been', with gradual policy changes. Office spaces between BC's are often consolidated to cut costs. The downside to running a company like this is that over time, you have an unnecessary amount of leadership. In some offices there are people from 4 or 5 different PCs, all reporting to different management. Watching our current economic downturn in Canada, separate BCs were actually competing against each other for opportunities, rather than working together to put the best team forward on projects. Some teams are even claiming opportunities and not following through, realizing they are ill-equipped for the work. While visiting different Stantec offices for work, I was approached with job offers and offers of salary increases. Seriously. The accounting system is good, but the reporting structure for financials is very negative. In the consulting business, you win some jobs and lose others. Some make money while others don't. It's simple, and it's the average of those jobs that makes you profitable. At Stantec, if you have money on the table at the end of a job: no recognition. If you have a write off at the end of the job, you have forms to fill and people to answer to. Writing off money in Stantec isn't an option, so project managers are forced to seek extras from the clients, no matter the cause. In our office we lost a lot of great clients over this 'penny-wise-pound-foolish' approach. As a PM, you might have a signing authority on new contracts for $100,000, but you can't write off more than $2,000. Any more and you have to get approval from bosses' bosses'. On more than one occasion I was told that I couldn't write what amounted to 3% of project revenue. On a $30k project, I spent 4 hours trying to chase $1,000 dollars that we were over. The client even asked me point blank; "How long did it take you to dig up all this information?". There is an annual review process and goal setting process. It's pretty comprehensive, but now they've moved to a system which can auto-populate your goals, and you can basically sign off. I question whether this approach is effective for personal development. There is no salary review during that time. Your salary increases are awarded by leadership. A typical BC manager has a percentage of revenue that he can split between all the BC staff. You get an email in December that says 'here's your raise'. The raises are generally communicated by supervisors, but they've had no hand in the process and are unable to answer questions. More on the topic of salaries: when an employee is hired, the job classification, employee qualifications, and salary expectations are sent out to an office in the US. It's a simple 'yes' or 'no' that is returned. If the salary expectation is too high, it's a no. Negotiation is done by the hiring manager before the package is sent off for approval. If it's someone you really need, or it's a strategic hire, it may be worth the cost to pay more: so you re-classify the job as a manager position, then pair the person's resume and send it off for approval. This means two things: (1) the person is hired for a position the company doesn't intend to fill, and (2), if an employee is getting paid a fixed amount and there have been no meaningful salary increases, they'll soon find themselves supervising and training staff that are getting paid just as much as they are... And then you leave the company. As a reference, when I left the company, I was able to negotiate a 15% raise, an extra week vacation, and 12% bonus eligible for doing the same job at another firm. When I joined the company my employee ID was 90,000. After 2.5 years, the summer student we hired had an employee ID of 120,000. The company has a total staff count of about 14,000. The company is very risk aware, and they extend this to their employees. When they lay-off employees, they'll escort you out, box your stuff and mail it to you (even for an office of 10 people). When you have a company phone or BYOD, they make you sign an agreement stating that they can brick your phone remotely at any time, they can track your location, and they own your phone number (yes, even BYOD). There is regular training where you are required to sign off that you understand the policies or the training you just had (and that you accept the risks): even for things like office ergonomics and office safety, harassment policy (annual), drug and alcohol policy (annual), etc. And all of these courses also have a 'supervisor' course if you are placed in charge of staff. The safety program is a mountain of paperwork, and most safety training is delivered out of a powerpoint or online course (and yes, you sign saying you are fully aware and accept the risks). I was acquired as a smaller company based in small towns. Over the four years with Stantec, the office culture changed (company policy is no beer on Fridays, people were under more pressure over work/financial performance, our management lost control of things like corporate sponsorships we had always made in our community). The BC leaders saw opportunities to leverage our location by hunting more profitable work that had nothing to do with our offices (our offices were in buildings engineering, and they were hunting large oil/gas jobs, environmental services, etc). As a result, they became less aware of our day-to-day operations, and the quality and project delivery started to lag. When a larger project would come up, we would end up pushing it to a major office because they would deliver it for half the cost. (As a separate BC, you can bid $100k on a job, and subcontract if to another BC for $75k, and pocket the rest). We would be local representatives, provide field review services and design the site services on the building exterior. Timesheets are done on oracle, and they are miserable. If you work overtime on a project, you need to pay 7.5 hours to the project, 0.5 hours to overtime straight time, and the rest to overtime. Each project can have three entries. If you are busy, timesheets can take two hours at the end of the week. If you miss submitting your timesheet by Friday at midnight, you'll be personally contacted by senior leadership (like someone you didn't even know existed). As a discipline team lead with 4 direct reports, my utilization target was fixed at 85%. Company sponsors a community day, to help reach out to local groups and provide assistance. This amounted to around 3 hours per person in our BC, but they paid photographers for each office, and made sure every employee was wearing a stantec t-shirt. I could keep going. The bottom line is that every BC is going to be operated differently, so check with someone that works in the office if you are considering Stantec. This is especially important for offices that were recently acquired, since the employees there may not fully understand the company yet. Negotiate your salary aggressively, because this is your last chance. Read and copy everything that you sign, and maintain your own records and files on a USB stick that you can keep with you in case you are laid off and can't collect your belongings. Be careful about accepting an associate/senior associate position, since usually it is without overtime pay. They'll bonus you, but the 5% won’t make up for the 15% in overtime hours. If you like designations after your name, you'll be able to get a few of these in lieu of salary increases.