Great company, great products and a good place to build a solid set of skills and experience
Pros
Excellent company to build up your career in sales or the construction industry. Would especially recommend Hilti to recent graduates or those in the early stages of their career. There are certainly opportunities to progress up the ladder, as well as a variety of functional areas to choose from- account manager, key accounts, regional mangement, project engineering, specification engineering, product mangement, etc. The culture within the company is good (despite deteriorating over recent years) and is still head and shoulders above other big corporates I've worked for. Hilti generally is made up of great people who are always willing to help and support you. A lot of time and resources are invested in your training and development. One of the best things about Hilti is the quality of the products and services and Hilti's reputation within the industry. They're always ahead of the curve in new technology, so if you're technically minded and are interested in technology/construction then you won't be bored.
Cons
Like any company Hilti has its fair share of challenges and issues. It is very heavily process orientated, almost to the point of being blind to common sense. Account managers are treated like robots, with little autonomy to exercise their own creativity or judgement. There are too many boxes to tick and not necessarily boxes that will directly contribute to sales and profitability target achievement. You almost need to tick these just for the sake of it so that any reports management run on you show up with as much 'green' as possible. Too much of your evaluation is based on cold numbers rather than an understanding of the story behind the numbers, or the overall value you bring to the company. There is a lot of politics and being 'in' with the right managers and directors will help your career progress. Also, being seen to be doing the right things can be more important than actually delivering any real value. Too often people are promoted for these reasons and do not necessarily have the right balance of experience, knowledge and soft skills. This only later becomes apparent when the damage has been done and valuable experienced people start to leave in numbers. The level of overall experience within the company is falling. There is now an imbalance with too many people without the necessary industry or functional experience. As a consequence people are being promoted to managers prematurely while still lacking basic functional and industry knowledge, resulting in a 'blind leading the blind' situation.
