Avantages
Benefits are great, people are great to work with. This company has a very professional atmosphere, gives free coffee. If traveling on a field assignment, the compensation is excellent (per diem and overtime). If all you do is field assignments you can make really good money. Travel, even when just an office engineer, can sometimes take you around the world! This is a multicultural company with people working together from Switzerland, France, Germany, Poland, and India all in the same office.
Inconvénients
Collaboration between business groups is not good. Alstom doesn't advertise in the US, so anyone who doesn't know us won't know to look for us for turbine services. We have a solid customer base, but we don't increase it. If you stay in the office most of the time, you won't see overtime. Internal mobility is encouraged, but some departments have no path upward. You would have to move to a completely different department to expand your career path. Also training is limited to internal courses which aren't helpful unless all you aspire to do is to "conduct better meetings" or "improve powerpoint skills." Not hardly any training in engineer advancement. Work/life balance is only as good as your manager. There's no global policy on work/life balance. So you could have a boss that expects you to make up 1 hour if you have some personal business to take care of, or you could have a boss that isn't worried about every little hour and trusts you to get your work done. I've had both at this company.