Volvo Group Reviews

Hard Work gets name sake recognition. Lot of employees are lethargic and there are some hardworkers (~15%-20%) who carry the load of others. Some Engineers and Buyers spend 6-7 hours per day moving around chatting with various people and browsing internet or on the phone attending personal business. Sometimes employees disappear for hours and can be seen coming back through gates later. Since there is no clock-in and clock-out for white collar employees no one is held accountable. Hard work does not pay here. One cannot expect to be promoted and even when promoted you will max. out after certain level. All the upper level Management positions are reserved for Swedes and French and some leftover positions are reserved for White Males. It is a matter of "who you know" than "what you know". Office politics are galore and promotions are based on advancing someone's ideology. People with Master's and Ph.D's working as Engineers for-ever and some with Associates degrees promoted to Project Managers and Group Managers. Volvo boasts big-time about diversity but most of it comes from hiring few Swedes, French and some Brazilian Chinese and Indians (~5% of work force). In Hagerstown-MD,on the Product Development Engineering side out of 270 Engineers, Designers, Managers, Mechanics & Technicians there are almost no Black employees in the rank and file. There is very little real Engineering done here. Most of the Engine & Transmission development is done in Sweden and Hagerstown is Application Engineering site for US emission compliance. You might have some luck doing some real Engineering with Chassis Engineering in Greensboro, NC but the politics and career progression is very identical over there. Manufacturing is not a place to be and most of the Mfg. Engineers have no clue about Manufacturing as we have mostly become an assembly plant. There are lot of Supplier Quality "Engineers" with high school diplomas or Associate Degrees and have hard time reading or interpreting a drawing.

The culture is soul sucking. HR does not value employees and believes they can engineer the perfect organization with utterly replaceable people at all levels. The pay is average to below average. There's no growth at the company, and it is in fact contracting. The benefits suck. No one cares about building a quality product and the only KPI in the company is cost. The IT organization is the most dysfunctional, so good luck getting any help from them for anything beyond resetting your password. If you have any shred of energy, passion, creativity, or ambition then you should run as fast as possible in the other direction. Basically, this company has a leadership vacuum and no vision. The current CEO is milking the cow for its last bit of milk, while butchering the company bit by bit to prop up the share price.