Pros

the place is nice to work and the education benefits are good. the culture is also pretty good at most loactions

Cons

the pay scale is pretty poor and a lot of people leave after getting degrees, the benifits could use some upgrades

Advice to Senior Management

pay the young talent more and give them more items to work on so that they dont leave for other places where they can be challenged

Pros

Commitment to furthering education and EH&S are very strong. Work hours are decent for manufacturing outfits. Salaried workforce is often eligible for at least 1X overtime pay.

Cons

Firm conducts regular employee surveys, promises to take action on shortcomings, and seemingly never does. Support for personal growth is at odds with a general lack of advancement opportunity. Very rarely do I observe people promoted from within and when I do, it tends to be those in mid to upper management. New hires are often brought in from the outside and offered top level positions that appear out of thin air. Genuine continuous improvement at this company is still in its infancy. ACE could be so much more but right now its bark is far worse than its bite. Management doesn't support it enough. I question sometimes if they even understand it. Annual review process is a box check. I performed better one year than another, by the numbers, yet still received a lower overall score.

Advice to Senior Management

Offer incentives that encourage employees to acquire training and education in fields directly related to their jobs. Promote them!

Pros

The Employee Scholar Program is awesome. They pay for everything and you can take classes in anything you want, not just courses related to your current position. Working for UTC provides you with the opportunity to see different business because they own 8 different subsidiaries, but still work for the same company. All the companies are market leaders and provide challenging work.

Cons

All the busineses are within the manufacturing industry so if you are looking for something other than that, this is not the place. There is really no interaction with consumers or the public. Only business to business/government. UTC also has an aging workforce that have been with the company for many years. This is a good thing which shows loyalty to the company but they are so they are stuck in their ways. It's hard for young workers to adjust and accept that their coworkers and supervisors just are not ready for change.

Advice to Senior Management

I believe UTC should make a conscious effort to bring in and retain young, new blood into the company.

Pros

Wide variety of business issues
Ability to work on projects of diverse geographic scope
Opportunity to work with cutting edge technology

Cons

highly bureaucratic environment
human capital management activities are very poor
internal rotational activities or initiatives are almost nonexistent, little career flexibility

Advice to Senior Management

Make the human capital management activities proactive rather than reactive
With wide variety of business unit focus on developing generalists rather than specialists
Engage line managers in the process of speaking with line employees about their development

Pros

Development if technical and leadership skills. Professional workforce and great educational opportunities.

Cons

Depending on group and division, one can be placed on a very slow career path. It's best to pursue other opportunities with UTC after about 3-5 years.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to the team and stop making unrealistic promises that cannot be kept.

Pros

Leading edge products that are actually helping the USA and the world. Efficient aircraft engines reduce our use of fossil fuels and Fuel cells let us run mass transit on clean hydrogen. The company has a fairly flat management hierarchy, which means that access to management is good. The work environment is professional without being stuffy.

Cons

Union rules and inconsistency of qualities of workers assigned make it hard to manage engineering projects. Management often allows projects, especially software to begin without nailing down the end customer requirements, which results in the software team having to code to "a move target" and therefore always being late because the estimates the team gave were based on fixed requirements. Flat hierarchy means less positions to move up into, so after a few years it makes sense to move on.

Advice to Senior Management

Plan out your requirements a little more before beginning to work on a project. Get the end customer more involved in software requirements, then hold the line about changes.

Pros

I work for a division of Pratt & Whitney which is one of the major business units of UTC. We were purchased from the Boeing Company a little less than 3.5 years ago. Before that, we were owned by Rockwell International. I have worked for these three major multi-national corporations essentially without changing desks. Of the three, UTC is the second best. Regardless, I get to work on - among other things - rocket engines and I get to be part of hurling humans into space. What could be bad about that? UTC has, over all, really exciting products to be working on and I get to work on what I consider some of the most exciting. That's reason enough for me. Overall, as well, the pay and benefits aren't all that bad and the corporation tries to be responsible and respectful.

Cons

UTC is very hierarchical and backward-looking when it comes to its management style. The company is top-heavy with attorneys, overly protective of Intellectual Property, and verges on the paranoid with respect to intranet and Internet security. There is little trust displayed in how the corporation protects those interests it seems to divorce from the interests of its employees. They have also moved to outsource virtually all of their information technology assets. This appears to be unfortunate in light of the seismic changes occurring in web-based (Internet or intranet) services and the design principles behind them - sometimes referred to as Web 2.0. My experience is that very few people involved in IT (especially the "leadership") have little idea of what's going on in the outside world that is driving the development of web-based services.

So . . . when it comes to information technology as it is used in support of business processes and innovation, I would aver that United Technologies is well behind the curve and is digging itself a hole that may be hard to climb out of someday; maybe soon.

Advice to Senior Management

Lighten up. Learn to trust your employees a little more or, at the least, recognize that preventing what damage one or two people can do just might also be preventing a huge amount of progress and value-added innovation everyone else could have discovered or created if only you hadn't made it so clear you didn't trust them. Address this problem and maybe our technologies would REALLY be United.

Pros

Employee scholarship program - free tuition, regardless of study area.

Cons

Incompetent middle management. Recently, there have been many lay-offs and movements of senior managers. Middle management has been aware of them, but failed to communicate any information to us. In fact, they herded us into a room and demanded to know what rumors we'd heard about the reorganization (while indicating that they knew everything and would not tell us about it).

Low recognition of staff. One of the products released this year had been under the guidance of someone who was laid off. The new manager came in and took all the kudos for the new product, with no indication that it had, in fact, been 90% completed by the previous team (including people still in the organization).

Advice to Senior Management

Sack middle managers.

Pros

Exciting products; challenging work; opportunity for advancement if not necessarily in a particular field of expertise or geographic area

Cons

compensation appears to be below market; office resources are too limited; high stress

Advice to Senior Management

foster a more cooperative work environment

Pros

There is a great Employee Scholar Program. All costs related to higher education are covered by UTC.

Cons

Sometimes the company can seem a little slow paced due to the small town mentality although it is an international company.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior management are very much in touch with that is going on at the lower level. No advice.