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.