This firm has tried an "experiment" in British Columbia to move young people with no experience into senior leadership, engineering and marketing positions. Sadly, this experiment will be called a failure as soon as someone wakes up to the fact that the staff contingent in BC has dropped from 850 people to probably well under 600 in just two years and continues to drop at an alarming rate. Firings, layoffs and self-terminations continue to hurt the bottom line and this firm has no money to attract new talent as a result, therefore it has a long ways to go down before it goes up.
Stantec has a compartmentalized "Profit Centre" system that could work as long as labour that is performed for other profit centres was compensated at the full rate instead of only 2x nominal salary. Many profit centres have learned to exploit this dangerous nuance of the internal accounting system, and frequently get other offices to work on their projects without fully compensating them for the work; basically gypping another office or group of people out of approximately 30% of their revenue. This type of accounting system fully contravenes the concept of work sharing and "one team infinite solutions" marketing BS that is fed to clients. The reality is that you're on your own, and very little work sharing will ever occur without changes to the accounting system, and proper "traffic cops" that take people to task on their abuses of the accounting system and work sharing.
Any attempts to engage local, regional, senior and executive team leadership to help them understand the dynamics of operating and growing a design firm are met with a closed door. I definitely hit a glass ceiling in my job.
There is also a growing problem of ladder climbers that have cozied their way into senior positions without any experience to actually work in those positions.
All in all, in one year's time I went from believing that my next 15 to 18 years would be spent happily doing my job for a solid company that I could retire with, to coming to work every day wondering what stupid and reckless decision management would make that day; and an anxiety disorder from the unbearable workload that resulting from mass firings and layoffs and angry clients. You guessed it - I left of my own volition to save my own skin.
My recommendation is do not work for this company until all regional managers and local managers are dismissed and new people are brought in with sound personnel, marketing, business, engineering and management skills.
