Stantec Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Stantec full-time for more than a year

Pros – upper management in edmonton no idea about how to run a architect company
young employees get lots of responcibility if they want

Cons – everyone leaves at 5. not a interesting office design . . dont do competitions. not enough creative designers

Advice to Senior Management – be more ambitious
no creativity ( its engineers)
do some interesting design to get noticed

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Stantec full-time

Pros – The management is fairly young (30's-40's) and have a better understanding of what drives and motivates younger workers who are replacing retirees. Flex time, work from home are great perks for the modern young professional with a family and kids.

The office culture is the most relaxed I've ever worked at. I'd rate cross-discipline communication at 4/5. Stantec is also a great place to climb up the ladder because it's such a large company with many opportunities. If you want to advance to a project manager from a biologist, they have internal training programs to train you in basic PM skills like finance, accounting, leadership. If you want to stay where you are and just rack up the experience in your field, you're free to do that too. Your team lead will check with you every quarter to see if you've achieved your career goals over the last few months.

Management within my office location seems to strongly promote harmony. People don't need to step over others to advance and the general belief is that if the company takes care of it's employees, the profit will come naturally through more efficient and satisfied employees. The company is willing to fly you to other office locations just to meet and greet other Stantec employees in your field, so that you're not calling them and asking for information without ever knowing what they look like.

Cons – While the total number of people in a given department can be large among the company, like 50 wildlife biologists in the company, some departments can be pretty scattered resulting in only 1 or 2 people in an office location. It can make it difficult for the more isolated people to learn and advance.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Stantec full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Location, benefits, RRSPs, other staff.

Cons – Size leads to lack of options for progress, easy to be overlooked. Another reviewer said "If you're a young person and can curry favour , you can't beat it as a place to learn and advance." - this is completely true, if you are young and awesome but fly under the radar, less talented people are often promoted and given opportunities ahead of you.

Another reviewer said: They definitely played favorites with work assignments, training, and bonuses. - True

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Stantec full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – ability to work across North America from many offices
strong presence in multiple sectors and service lines
ability to be part of multi-disipline projects

Cons – some managers with misplaced focus on utilization of thier people over what is best for clients and the company

Advice to Senior Management – management approach is still not consistent with the CEO's vision in all regions, need to identify managers that are just out to climb the ladder and not develop employees, quality services that will lead to organic growth

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Stantec full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Variety of project types and sizes

Cons – Driven by the the bottom line
Work-sharing doesn't really work - offices fight for revenue
Different offices compete for the same work
Young managers are put in over their heads
They simply don't care about their people

Advice to Senior Management – What upper management says to the offices doesn't matter.
People Center? not a chance!

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Stantec

Pros – OK salary, good benefits
Big company
Maybe good if you're an engineer

Cons – As one co-worker put it, it's more like "One company, infinite egos". I was brought in as a intermediate/senior environmental specialist and was put onto projects I had no experience with, given no real training, and kept on being told incomplete information about projects I was given to work on, making me look the fool in front of clients. After becoming one of the top employees in three years at my previous company, I was "let go" after less than a year. A demotivating company.

Advice to Senior Management – Get people to work within their skillsets, and train them into senior roles

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Stantec full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – A place to work if you need a job

Cons – All about the share holders

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Stantec full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – - diversity of business/income/sector/regional cash flows
- excellent IT and marketing infrastructure

Cons – 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.

Advice to Senior Management – When you're finally down to under 400 staff in BC, you'll finally get it that your experiment with young people into senior positions has failed, and along with it nearly every employee with 15+ years experience has left and morphed into other super firms that you'll never be able to compete against.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Stantec

Pros – Multi-disciplined, work sharing, professional atmosphere

Cons – office (profit center) based corporate structure, wanting to be a global player but not there yet

Current Employee – been working at Stantec

Pros – Generally good people. Good benefits

Cons – Only an Engineer has any hope of advancement, whether they deserve it or not. Technologists are third class citizens.