Kimley-Horn and Associates Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Kimley-Horn and Associates

Pros – KHA has a very good bonus program

Cons – The company is too quick to lay off

Current Employee – been working at Kimley-Horn and Associates

Pros – opportunities for advancement, fairly transparent management, great staff

Cons – mandated 46+ hours per week regardless of demands of workload, expect lots of pressure if your utilization hours goal isn't met on a weekly basis

Advice to Senior Management – Drop extra effort goals, which makes staff focus on logging hours rather than focusing on efficiency and quality. Ease UT goals for senior staff that bring in jobstarts; we need them to win jobs to keep their teams busy.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Kimley-Horn and Associates

Pros – There are some wonderful people to work with at this company. If you choose to, you can learn about business and project management even if you are focused on IT.

Cons – The company culture requires a great deal of personal sacrifice. I realized when I resigned that this one thing is more important than all the others. They want you to work at least 115% effort (45+) hours but many people have to work much more than that to gain recognition. This is not always a bad thing, but you need to make sure you are ready to make this type of commitment. From an IT perspective, there are a lot of companies better suited for a career in IT. I have many friends that left this company and felt ready to abandon IT careers completely. However, once they found new positions they had a renewed passion for their chosen profession. Sadly, it is the kind of environment that treats the IT like second-class citizens much of the time. Also, it is worth noting that they have seen a high degree of turnover in the last couple of years and more and more of it is voluntary as opposed to the layoffs seen in 2007-2009 but layoffs are still happening as of January 2011.

Advice to Senior Management – Your employees should be your most valuable asset. Perhaps it's time for a little less hubris and a little more humility. It may be more beneficial to understand why good people are leaving than to assume they "aren't a good fit." That excuse has allowed you to become too insular and rigid. Creative, thinking, passionate people are less likely to remain in that type of environment and a company full of Yes Men is not going to be able to innovate and compete.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Kimley-Horn and Associates

Pros – A lot of opportunity to learn "on the job". Young engineers are given more responsibilities. Great pay and great benefits. Engineers are exceptionally talented. 5 years of experience in Kimley = 7 years of experience elsewhere in the industry. This is because, they make you work really long hours.

Cons – Promotions after reaching P4 or P5 level are all politics. If you somehow manage to become a shareholder and want to leave the company, you will have to forfeit half of your stock ( I mean the stock you purchased to become a shareholder). This is true even if they let you go. I know of a senior manager who had to forfeit around $100K after he got fired form an office in South Florida. My recommendation is that if you want to slog for 3-4 years after college and gain good experience, make $$ and quit, this is a good place. If you are planning to stay for a long time, plan to commit your whole life. They will make it really painful for you to leave after you become a shareholder.

Advice to Senior Management – We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them...Albert.Einstein.
Please snap out of your current ideology and adopt a sustainable practice of valuing your employees. You lost about 50% (2800 to 1500) of your work force....highest percentage loss among your peers. Road ahead is long and arduous for you. learn from other successful companies and don't treat employees as commodities. You are not running a WalMart. You are running a consulting company.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Kimley-Horn and Associates

Pros – This was a great first job because I appreciate all of the things my new employer offers me. More than 7 paid holidays and actual vacation time!

Cons – They push extra effort when there is no work. They want you to 120% of a work week (48 hours minimum), which would not be an issue if there was actually stuff to do that was not administrative work. They nickel and dime there clients to the bone. They claim they charge more because they provide quality deliverables, but in reality they are more expensive because everyone in the office will charge a job for even thinking about it (even the regional business manager).

If you want to take time off, you have to almost equal additional time. For example, if you want to take a week off (not billable), you have to work 37 extra hours to do so or your UT will suffer. This can be very hard to do when there is no work. Vacation, sick time and holidays are all non-billable hours that count against you and they set the goals very high (>94%).

I would be careful when considering accepting a job here. They told me that they were loaded with awesome projects and they could not wait to get me in. Well, after a month of being there, they laid off 5 people. By the time I left, almost 30% of the company had been laid-off.

Advice to Senior Management – I wish you the best of luck!

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Kimley-Horn and Associates

Pros – Provided a place to learn about A/E industry

Cons – Very bad regional management, nocomunication, lots of closed door meetings, no open communication. Dry company = awkward holiday parties

Advice to Senior Management – Talk to your employees!

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Kimley-Horn and Associates

Pros – Compared to others in the industry, Kimley-Horn has a very strong total compensation package. The highlights of the package are the profit sharing (~17%) and the bonuses. I think they try to keep the salaries around the industry average.

The corporate culture is very strong and really emphasizes the develpment of each employee. The training at Kimley-Horn is somewhat limited but they are making an effort to improve in this area.

Cons – Expect to spend most of your time chugging away at a computer for the first 4-5 years.

The promotions can get a little political - I was very disappointed to the the promotion of somebody that stepped on others toes to rise to the top.

The "extra-effort" culture can get a little annoying - mostly because the regional team micromanages everybody's billable hours.

I am not sure that the company is going in a good direction. There are going to be some growing and adjusting pains as the company reaches a critical mass for the small markets which they typically serve and start to seek out the larger projects. They are starting to win projects with the big players in the industry and in so doing are becoming more similar to the big players (i.e. hiring big wigs with big names to win the big projects and moving people around to serve projects)

Advice to Senior Management – Improve cost of living adjustment

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Kimley-Horn and Associates

Pros – company provides very good benefits

Cons – company experiences high employee turnover

Advice to Senior Management – continous growth and stability rather than fast growth in good times and large reductions in bad times

Former Employee – worked at Kimley-Horn and Associates

Pros – Kimley-Horn is definately a culture built around its employees. From the beginning you are encouraged to build a network throughout the firm through free lunch coupons and a yearly conference for all new hires. At the conference, you get the opportunity to meet new hires all over the country and meet the senior leadership of the firm. Kimley-Horn has one of the best benefit packages I have ever seen. They take care of all healthcare costs (at the time if this posting) and have an amazing profit sharing program that has averaged 12-16% over the past 5 years. That is an amazing amount of money that is instantly put into your retirement account. The culture promotes expanding your horizons and allows you to grow with the firm and build your way up the ranks.

Cons – I found that the firm was reluctant to find common grounds between the regions. It is difficult to rank a person with the same title in a different region because each office is built differently. This can cause problems when salary and bonuses are decided because the salary pools are decided on a firmwide basis.

Advice to Senior Management – Keep up the open door policy, it really adds to the team culture.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Kimley-Horn and Associates

Pros – Kimley-Horn and Associates has outstanding employee benefits. Vacation time is generous, a 401k match is in place, and bonuses were given to all employees during my tenure. Further, after vesting period, a profit sharing contribution is paid to employee retirement accounts. Professional registrations are paid for, and assistance toward further education is provided.

Cons – Work/life balance will suffer at KHA compared to many other firms. As an extra-effort firm, KHA mandates approximately 46 hours a week in order to comply with metrics used for bonuses and employee recognition. When times went well, this 46 hour standard was frequently exceeded. Last-minute travel was required fairly frequently as well. Additionally, vacation time may be hard to use, as its use counts against utilization rate calculations also used to determine bonuses and raises.

Advice to Senior Management – Senior Management should pay special attention to the development of Junior Analysts, in order to decrease turnover and provide a sense that the company is concerned with career development. This can be lacking at times. Additionally, market diversification is critical. KHA was severely impacted during this economic downturn, as were many corporations everywhere. However, increased emphasis on the stability of government work as opposed to the profitability of private sector work might have softened the blow.