Pros
- A very friendly and welcoming environment. Easy to make friends especially when joining as a graduate.
- Decent company values with a focus on sustainability, digital skills, and 'shaping a better world'.
- The pension scheme is quite good (you put in 6% and the company puts in 12%). However, this has now been reduced to 5%/10% for new employees.
- Other company benefits are standard and comparable to other consultancies (e.g. life assurance, health insurance, optional benefits such as travel insurance, critical illness cover, cycle to work scheme etc.)
- Excellent annual leave policy. You get a baseline of 25 days + bank holidays (8) + you can purchase 5 days every year. On top of this, you can roll over up to 20 unused days of leave every year, meaning that you could end up with 40-50 days of leave in a single year!
- There are rewards for long service. If you've worked for 5 years, you get an extra week of leave (just for that year) + ~£400. There are similar awards for the 10 and 20 year milestones.
- There is profit share twice a year (June and November). How much you receive depends on your grade and company profits. However, in the past year, profit share has either been poor or non-existent.
- Good work-life balance. This would of course depend on what team you're in but in general, I was never feeling overworked and didn't have to do overtime.
- Plenty of office and team social events.
- Hybrid working policy.
- Opportunity to relocate to other UK offices and work from other offices.
- Can easily build a large and varied network as many project teams are cross-office.
Cons
- The salaries are low compared to other companies. Many people have left in the past year because of this. There is a lot of overlap in salaries between different grades and annual pay rises are not particularly high. This year, the pay rise budget was half of what it was last year so some people promoted to grades 4 and 5 were only offered a 4-8% increase.
- There was no profit share in November 2023, and the profit share received in June 2023 was poor. One of the perks of working at Arup is profit share, especially as new hires are often sold the 'total rewards statement' line, where they're told that yes their base salary is low, but they're actually getting so much more than that because of profit share and the value of all the other benefits such as health insurance etc. Recruiters at Arup often lead with the 'total reward' salary to make it look like you're being paid more than you actually are, before clarifying what the actual base salary is.
- Redundancies. There were voluntary redundancies last year for grades 7-9 across the UK. At the start of 2024, it was announced there would be compulsory redundancies in the London office and across the digital services portfolio.
- Redundancies + no profit share + low pay rises in 2024 has resulted in low morale and many people looking for jobs elsewhere.
- Career opportunities and progression within the company depends a lot on what team you're in and how supportive and ambitious your managers are. It can be difficult to find out about new opportunities and progress quickly if the right support isn't there.
- Lack of training opportunities and being told there isn't enough training budget.
- In the engineering side of the business, chartership is required for promotion to grade 5. However, there have been many exceptions to this rule. There are people with 8+ years' experience still at G4 because they're not chartered while there are others with 4 years experience and no chartership already being promoted to G5.
- For long term progression within Arup, there is a view that it is easier to progress if you go down the management route. There isn't really a clear pathway for technical roles for those who would prefer that route.
- Arup is a worldwide company and graduates are often told that there is the opportunity to do short or long term assignments (STA/LTA) abroad. However, in reality, it is really difficult to get an LTA. Many locations require staff to be chartered before moving so this isn't really an opportunity for early careers staff in the way it is initially sold. In the 5+ years I was at Arup, only 2 people in my wider team went on LTA and they were grade 5 when they moved. These LTAs were before 2020/2021 and since then, no one in the team has done an LTA.
