URS Reviews

Pros

URS is one of the top engineering firms in the country.

Cons

URS tends to forget about the consultants out in the field.

Pros

Flexible work time for employee

Cons

Employer oriented. which means something

Advice to Senior Management

Employee oriented

Pros

Lots of opportunities for advancement within existing job or in another department. HR and managers encourage you to find your own path.

Cons

Communication from senior management to local operations was infrequent and vague. Sometimes corporate services departments were used to relay unpopular messages from senior management to local management.

Advice to Senior Management

Establish clear, unified vision and mission for company (including Washington Division). The company feels very fragmented, with each division fending for themselves instead of sharing best practices.

Pros

Their range of service lines offers vast opportunities.

Cons

2% (or 50% up to 4% of salary) 401K match

Pros

Large Company with a good chance to learn a variety of skills. Decent benefits.

Cons

The immediate feeling you will get is that you are just a number. You are expected to be 100% billable.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't expect an entry level employee to run your projects, If you don't want to support them or communicate.

Pros

the only thing good about the job is the pay

Cons

Upper management is not familiar with actual tasking and workload

Advice to Senior Management

get off your butts and see what your employees have to endure in their day to day tasking

Pros

Great Continuing Education
Global Company
Many opportunities in differnet divisions and countries
Decent tuition reimbursement
Decent mentoring if you are one of the chosen ones.

Cons

Almost zero at risk work performed.
Live and die by government contracts
Global, so a california office can disqualify you form bidding or may result in negative feedback that effects future projects.
CM division full of high paid whales that eat up the majooritty of project budets, so little is left in salary for tthe smaller fish that support them
Large company with very little name brand recognition

Advice to Senior Management

URS has a two tiered sytem, for it CM division. There is certain dead wood that should have been trimmed a long tome ago, but hasn't. One particular Senior PM has has been accussedo f steeling materials from a project, has had numerous compalints regarding his lack of performance from clients, conducts more of his bussiness instead of company bussiness at work, comes and goes as he pleases but yet he is still employed. It is painfully obvious that if you are part of this inner circle you can do no wrong. It's dishearthening to the rest of the employees.

Pros

There are opportunities you can pursue, you can change you career path if you can get a change of demonstrating you skill. For the less ambitious you can hover in a position as long as you stay productive.

Cons

Most opportunities will take some personal time to succeed. If you don’t stand up for yourself no one else will. Wide variety of project managers.

Advice to Senior Management

Office and Project management needs to stay in touch with the staff doing the work. Corp management needs to justify the 17 million they take home. Koffel does a good job but it’s hard to see how he can justify a benefits package of 6.7 million.

Pros

The pay and hours to work. The work load is well ballanced.

Cons

The miles from town that is needed to travel.

Pros

I like working for URS because they are a large company that can bid on big, complex (& therefore interesting) projects. They are open to allowing transfers between offices, & they have offices all over the world. They offer same-sex (& opposite-sex) domestic partnership benefits that are as close to equal to the benefits offered to married couples as the company can make them. I believe that we perform science and engineering projects to a high degree of skill and professionalism.

Cons

This company is not really a single, unified company - it is a patchwork of competing fiefdoms. This leads to really aggravating complications when trying to do work with other offices. The corporate culture varies wildly from office to office. There is a growing amount of bureaucracy - approvals to bid on work, H&S paperwork that never, ever ends.... just lots of forms.

Advice to Senior Management

If we're making profits, why aren't we all getting raises? It's galling in the extreme to read about our profitability and then receive a minimal cost-of-living salary increase. I work hard - pay me appropriately.