Career Progression Is Engineering & Construction’s Biggest Culture Blind Spot
Engineering and construction firms are competing harder than ever for skilled people — engineers, project managers, site talent — against a backdrop of well-documented skills shortages across the sector.
So we set out to answer a simple question: across the industry’s largest firms, how does employee sentiment actually look on the topic that matters most to retaining that talent — career progression?
What we looked at
We benchmarked 2025 Employee Net Sentiment Score (NSS) on career progression across a peer set of 19 major engineering, construction and design firms, spanning both large-scale contractors and delivery firms, and design and engineering consultancies.
Contractors & delivery firms
10 companies
| 1 | Larsen & Toubro |
| 2 | KBR |
| 3 | Vinci |
| 4 | Saipem |
| 5 | Balfour Beatty |
| 6 | Turner Construction |
| 7 | Bechtel |
| 8 | Kier Group |
| 9 | Fluor |
| 10 | Lendlease |
Design & engineering consultancies
9 companies
| 1 | WSP Global |
| 2 | AECOM |
| 3 | Arup |
| 4 | Jacobs Solutions |
| 5 | Turner & Townsend |
| 6 | Burns & McDonnell |
| 7 | Ramboll |
| 8 | Kimley-Horn |
| 9 | Mace Group |
19 companies total. Scores are drawn from published employee reviews and are not verified or endorsed by the companies named. No individual company's score is shown anywhere in this campaign — peer-set aggregate figures only.
What found
We benchmarked 2025 Employee Net Sentiment Score (NSS) on career progression across a peer set of 19 major engineering, construction and design firms, spanning both large-scale contractors and delivery firms, and design and engineering consultancies.
Career Progression — 2025 Employee Net Sentiment Score (NSS) across the Engineering & Construction peer set
19 companies · individual scores anonymized · hover a point for its exact NSS
Career Progression NSS across the 19-company peer set. Individual company scores are not shown — this view is deliberately anonymised.
The result was one of the most one-sided findings we’ve seen in any sector benchmark. 18 of the 19 firms in the peer set failed to post a positive score on career progression in 2025 — most fell clearly into negative territory, a couple sat exactly at neutral, and only one firm broke into positive sentiment. The peer-set average NSS came out at -30.8%, on Deltabase’s standard -100% (strongly negative) to +100% (strongly positive) scale.
What stood out even more than the low average was the spread. Career progression showed wider variation between firms than any other topic we track for this sector — from -100% at the low end to +85% at the high end, wider than pay and rewards, wider than workload and bureaucracy, wider than leadership. And it isn’t simply a generally unhappy sector dragging every score down: this same peer set’s overall culture NSS averages -3.6%, close to neutral. Career progression alone sits 27 points below that. A low average paired with a wide spread usually means the same thing: some organisations have quietly solved a problem the rest of the sector is still struggling with, and haven’t been recognised for it.
How it affects people
Career progression sentiment is one of the more reliable early indicators of voluntary attrition in the data we track. When people can’t see a credible path upward, they rarely raise it as a complaint — they update their CV instead. For a sector already competing hard for a limited pool of engineering talent, a blind spot this wide — and this consistent — is a retention risk hiding in plain sight rather than a minor engagement metric.
How Does Your Organisation Compare?
In fairness to the companies in this peer set, we haven’t published any individual company’s score, in this piece or anywhere else publicly. What we can say is where the sector average sits and how wide the range is. Whether your own organisation is the outlier at the top, sitting in the crowded middle, or driving that -100% floor, is something we can only tell you privately.
If you’d like to see exactly where your organisation places against this 19-company peer set — your NSS, your rank, and the full theme-by-theme comparison across all twelve topics in our Culture Framework — request a confidential benchmark and we’ll walk you through it.
Leroy Hall
http://deltabase.ioLeroy Hall is a strategy and culture specialist at Deltabase, where he helps organizations unlock insights into leadership, workforce, and cultural dynamics through data-driven intelligence.
