Caterpillar reviews

4.0

78% would recommend to a friend

(7,307 total reviews)

Joe Creed

68% approve of CEO

74% positive business outlook

Caterpillar has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 7,307 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Caterpillar employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Industrie manufacturière industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

7K reviews
2.0
Jul 17, 2010
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

If you enjoy daily challenges and the ability to use your skills creatively, its a great place to work. You quite often get to see the results of your labors immediately, rewarding you at least with a "job well done" feeling.

Cons

For labor, pay for effort doesn't even come close to management salaries, let alone averages in the developed world. Prepare to hear the term "globally competitive" when management discusses labor pay. What they really mean is "we want all our workers to accept the Chinese $150/month wage". Prepare for constant back-stabbing as managers scrabble for each level up the career ladder regardless of who they have to step on along the way and to the detriment of the company as a whole. Also be ready to move a lot, as most jobs are moving south to the Republican "Right to Work (for less pay)" states. If you don't need any more friends, don't have a conscience and can kiss up to your betters and brow-beat your subordinates, you should fit right in to Cat's current management structure. Prepare to have to work to get noticed as the bloated, top-heavy structure of management at Cat makes it hard to stand out...unless you don't slavishly follow the status quo. This will only serve to relegate you to an out-of-the-way, dead end job posting. If you have less than a 4 year degree, don't bother unless you strive only to work in shop floor supervision. If you want more, not even 4 years is good enough. Senior management is now predominately filled with Degree toting number crunchers instead of those who worked their way up from the shop floor, meaning they know little to nothing about actual operations and care only about numbers, charts and Power Points.

3.0
Jul 12, 2010
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Fair compensation. Good work/life balance if you work in Peoria. Co-workers are friendly and willing to share information and lend help. Generally, managers support employees to gain cross business unit and cross functional experience. In the accounting world, employees are encouraged to get training, development and certifications at company's expense.

Cons

) Slow in decision making and research things to death before taking any actions, and as a result, tends to miss business opportunities. For example, Caterpillar upper management understands how important to gain leadership position in emerging markets, however, after it missed the best 10-year window from 1990 - 2000, it did very little in the past 10 years. When it comes to creating and managing partnerships, this company is very inexperienced and inflexible. A lot of people who work at frontline of emerging market business are lack of international experience, lack of understanding of local culture and naively believe that things work in North America will work anywhere else. It's a global company, but mentality wise, it's still an American company. 2) Performance management review is a joke. In the accounting world at Caterpillar, it seems that some managers who get the job is solely based on technical skills, and little attention is given to people skills. In addition, those managers did not get trained properly on how to deal with performance review and how to effectively communicate with subordinates. As a result, some managers abuse performance review process and unfairly treat employees, especially during recession. My former supervisor lied a lot of things on why he gave me a below average rating. And when I found out about his lies, he changed his story to justify the rating given to me. He failed to provide timely feedback during the year, failed to give me authority for me to do my work, and at end, he blamed me for not doing anything on a particular work while chose to completely ignored the progress and results I had done on other work. He got the lowest score on employee opinion survey among his peers; guess what, he got a big promotion. 3) This company talks about diversity a lot, but it does not value too much mid-career hire's pre-Cat experience. Let me give you one example. Take a look at vacation policy. Mid-career hires are treated as same as fresh graduate. There is no consistent vacation policy from HR on mid-career hires. It's case by case depending on how well you negotiate.

Viewing 7177 - 7179 of 7,307 Reviews

Glassdoor has 10,033 Caterpillar reviews submitted anonymously by Caterpillar employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Caterpillar is right for you.