GE Energy Reviews

Pros

The financial management program is GE's leadership program in finance. The classes you take are in accounting, both managerial and financial, controls and business strategy. The classes are very useful in your role and great for general knowledge on how businesses are ran.

The four roles you get on the program can make or break your experience. Personally, the roles I've received were beneficial in my career growth, with manager's that give decent feedback on your performance and help work with you on your career development.

Cons

There are several downsides to the program. Top of my list is the sheer amount of hours you devote towards GE. You have your normal role as expected, and you work 40+ hours a week. Like most other entry level career programs, you can expect to work 50+ or 60+ hours a week. In addition to that., you have to take the courses, which have recently become extremely time consuming. About 10+, 20+ hours a week. In the end, you spend every waking hour, breathing and living GE. Essentially the courses you study for as free training.

Your managers also vary every 6 months, and I will have to say that most I've found were mediocre at best. In my four rotations at GE, I have had one manager I truly thought was exceptional. The others were not, in my opinion and in GE's opinion (given the amount of time they've spent in their current positions) "promotion-worthy." The courses for the first year is also unnecessarily demanding.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to find not just 'good' managers for the different rotations, but 'great' managers. The courses for the first year are unnecessarily hard.

Pros

Still looking for a cutting edge technology

Cons

Large company, need to lean out some of their procedures

Pros

Average pay, lots of opportunities to learn and develop skills and job security.

Cons

Very competitive work place and lots of very smart people, sometimes it's hard for great employees to get noticed.

Pros

Having GE on the resume provides for automatic credibility. The culture is very "up or out", which is good in terms of opportunities for promotion.

Cons

As with any large organization, it is easy to become a cog in a wheel. It takes a lot of effort to get the bigger picture.

Pros

Challanging work and high expectations drive you to be a great Engineer. Global business builds communication skills and provides an opportunity to travel abroad. Coworkers are easy to work with and the vast range of expertise allows for great collaboration and problem solving.

Cons

Big business bureaucracy restricts creativity. Some managers are not directly involved in work done by those underneath them which makes it difficult to get an adequate and meaningful performance review.

Advice to Senior Management

Choices in managers closely working with Design Engineers should have a sound technical background and personality skills that make it easy to communicate with this person in technical and magagerial conversations.

Pros

Generally, GE is impressive on a resume and people who know it from earlier decades have a surprising reverence for the few remaining US employees.

Cons

Bureaucratic nightmares entangle in every possible task. At the present, upper management seems obsessed with cost and risk reduction as the only way to improve the company. All meaningful benefits have been stripped from employees (health, retirement, anything left is so limited as to be functionally useless).

Advice to Senior Management

Give back the benefits from five years ago, or give us pay increases to offset most of the tens of thousands you saved (and we now shoulder) by taking them away.

Pros

GE is a world class organization

Cons

Corporate life is not always appealing

Pros

big company a lot of perks. The company is one of the most advanced in the world and that is easy to tell when you work for them. They supply you with all the technology you need and do not hold back. If you are on salary you are expected to get your work done, but you can come and go as you please. Very liberating in that respect as people around me do not always need to come into the work location to work.

Cons

too big sometimes to function without tons of paper work. Too bureaucratic sometimes

Advice to Senior Management

none

Pros

Large company environment with flexible opportunities to move with in. Some really great people.

Cons

The great people do not work well in teams and often are not aligned.

Advice to Senior Management

Quickly put together systems around how the functions work with each other. Try to identify talent suited for systems environment by looking beyond the layers of smoke screen.

Pros

Technical depth (engineering) or other technical fields.
Large company size - lots of internal move opportunities (if only theoretically)
Resource availability

Cons

Too big to be efficient
Theoretical opportunities seldom play out
HR and Finance play too big of a role in management (running the company instead of leaders and managers)
Very slow to make any significant change
Compensation/benefits are not competitive to market

Advice to Senior Management

Hire only best people for middle-managers to make sure you can trust your team to foster and maintain the type of environment that will attract and retain talant.
Focus on long term, as opposed to short term live/die by the quarter - travel freezes and other policy rigidity only hurts the company and employees in the long run