Pros
Can gain good experience at the junior engineer level. Exposure to EPCM rather than purely maintenance engineering is a benefit. If you seek it out you can accelerate your learning by getting a good mix of design office experience coupled with site experience. Hatch can be a good place to build a resume as a junior engineer / graduate, if you manage and drive your work correctly. There are no real rigid work hours and your office time can be flexible. Some projects have core hours that all employees must be available for meetings and project work during but other than that you can work when you like. But you must bill 40 hour a week, every week. As others have said Hatch can be the goose that lays golden eggs - once you are an associate.
Cons
The company is very focused on billable hours. Fair enough, they are a business after all. But this can lead to being forgotten if you are on a site and have ongoing billable work. This is because the focus of management will be to find work for those that are running out of work or currently booking time to over heads. So if you are on a op support role on site you tend to be forgotten about. Overseas assignments and plumb jobs are given mainly to those in hub offices and to those in close proximity to the managers making the decisions. Training and career direction / advancement is a very smoke and mirrors type of set up. The phrase "it is your career and you must drive it" is often used to place the onus of career development and training upon the employee. Not once during my 5 years was I approached to attend a course or was I given career advice to attend certain courses. Remuneration is on the low side compared to industry standard. HR told me that they don’t want people in the Hatch "family" that are concerned about money as that does not fit into the Hatch "culture". I believe that this is why Hatch suffers from a skills gap for the 5 to 10 year experience range. Juniors come to Hatch, gain experience, but are not rewarded financially and so they leave for better paying competitor. Bonuses or “discretionary payments” as they are called were almost non-existent during my tenure. When one was paid it was a very small amount i.e. <$1k. But it is still better than nothing. The Professional Development Program is a joke. It is a purchased program bought from Engineers Australia as a pathway to gaining Chartered status. This is encouraged so that Hatch can justify billing you out for more. If you are not in the hub offices the internal PDP support is non-existent other than tedious phone hook-ups that provide little to no tangible value. Hatch will "try" to get you the experience required to complete the requirements for chartered status, but this is not really driven as a priority. Granted, Hatch does pay your fees for obtaining and maintaining chartered status. There is only passive mentoring i.e. only if you seek it out. Every graduate must choose a mentor but the mentors usually take little active role in mentoring the junior engineers. Communication throughout the organisation is cumbersome and a lot like Chinese whispers. Rumour hits you too long before a factual communication is released. The "chain of command" is difficult to understand due to the matrix structure that Hatch has adopted. There are many layers of reporting independent of each other. This is particularly prevalent if you are on site or posted to a project. You can have project, site, discipline and hub leads all in you reporting structure, all with different KPIs, all demanding different things. It is not clear which one (if any) takes priority. Over the last few years it appears that Hatch’s staff levels expand and contact like and accordion. If you don’t have a lot of work in your look ahead (work in view – one of the corporate KPIs) it is easy to feel insecure about your long term employment prospects.