Rockwell Automation Reviews

Pros

i interned here and I love the work environment and the people I work with. Lots of opportunities and freedom to choose the route we want.

Cons

Social activities and less interaction with other business groups.

Pros

The people I work with are great, there's a good mix of young and old professionals. I like the initiative being taken for a flexible work place, but I feel middle management and middle level professionals are not always able to take advantage of the program because there's too much work to do.

Cons

There's always enough work to keep you busy, but it's just that - busy work... I wish there were more challanging responsibilities in my role or that my manager would recognize that I need work that will keep me excited about what I'm doing.

Advice to Senior Management

Management should do a better job identifying the strengths and weaknesses of on individual and help them to set them up with projects suited to those characteristics. Also, constructive feedback is missing in total. I haven't had a manager provide feedback on my work except at our evaluation times.

Pros

Lots of loyal customers, easy to sell products.

Cons

Strange, exhaustive product mix, extensive shelf life (difficult to maintain Electronics products for 20yrs). Lots or proprietary implementation, sometime not typical nor engineering refine.

Advice to Senior Management

Pls improve portfolio management.

Pros

Lower workload comparatively to other similar companies in same industry

Cons

Limited exposure n learning opportunities provided by management. Turnover is known to be high in this company and HR should be trained to prevent talent drainage.

Advice to Senior Management

Commit resources and plans to groom identified talents. Install training budget and move the office back to a civilised location.

Pros

-flexible hours
-opportunity to work for a company with name recognition
-management is very accessible

Cons

-work life balance = fill in the gaps between work with the rest of your life.
-unequal access to promotions and training for those at headquarters
-unrealistic goals and expectations are the norm when it comes to annual planning

Advice to Senior Management

-start hosting regular town hall meetings with appropriate time for nonscripted questions

Pros

Great History and Aggressive growth

Cons

Future direction and ownership and communications to field organization

Pros

You get a lot of hands on experience as well playing with a lot of automation toys which can be a break from typical office cubical world.

The training they give in the beginning is great too.

Cons

Field Service Engineering position is the lowest engineering position at Rockwell. They hire Engineering Technology majors, even technicians with enough experience to do the job. Basically you don't need a real engineering degree to do the job.

Sales people (& everyone else at Rockwell) consider Field Service Engineers replaceable and therefore try to abuse them as much as they can.

Also one note about sales engineers, they have ZERO technical knowledge about what they sell. So they could sell an automation product claiming it will cure cancer and you have to go to customer and actually do it.

Advice to Senior Management

Change your company culture.

The only higher management people are old, white, and outdated people who've been at the company for over 20 or 30 years. None of them have any idea about how things are being done in other companies or try to learn from other successful businesses.

Pros

- Flexible work schedule
- Exposure to many different industry
- Company car
- Good work life balance
- Well recognized name
- Make great relationships with customers, team, and distributors
- Build relationships from plant floor to top-floor
- Industry leading product

Cons

- Most management comes from within and they are unaware of how other companies work
- They are consistently changing compensation, pay well below their competitors
- Some members of management are very disrespectful to employees
- It is a sales organization, if you want to be a Sales Manger it maybe a good place other than that not many options
- Never a leading edge company, always late to the game
- Very low moral in local sales office with high turn over
- Management comes from outside regions, they are unfamiliar with territory and do not accept input from vetren employees
- Many poorly executed activities from business novels

Advice to Senior Management

-Please respect your employees, having 29 year old team leads and 35 year old branch managers that cuss at you trying to imitate Ari Gold from Entourage is not the way to treat people. When you tell vetren employees old enough to be your father, that their wives should be calling to complain to them, people may quit as we have seen.
-Get your pay structure/commissions in line, it amazes people when I tell them Rockwell Automation, in 4 years has not figured out how to pay employees. The pay structure is clearly designed to put limits on earning potential, and control internal costs.

Pros

Very ethical company, lots of autonomy, good work/life balance, interesting field, wonderful collaborative culture (competitive without being cut-throat), outstanding colleagues that you'll be proud to work with

Cons

Very little recognition for outstanding work, very "clique-y" culture that easily excludes people who don't "fit in", opaque career paths, the midwest white male culture has a hard time grasping the needs and perspectives of global colleagues such as in Asia, very slow and risk averse. It seemed that only the squeaky wheels got rewarded, so those with narcissistic personalities got promotions, raises, and other rewards while those who were doing excellent work in a collaborative way were completely overlooked.

Advice to Senior Management

If people do a good job, TELL them. Ideally, tell them with money or other financial rewards (though a verbal thank you goes a long way, too). Ignored behavior goes away. That includes good behavior.

Pros

I was able to work with people from many different backgrounds. I learned a lot about many cultures. Management treated me well and recognized good work with awards etc.

Cons

Initial pay was fairly low. Plants are being closed as much of the manufacturing is moving overseas, this will limit the advancement opportunities for the future.

Advice to Senior Management

Even though from a cost stand point it is easy to ship jobs overseas. Please try to keep jobs in this country as much as possible if you can still be compete with other firms.