Advise on Career Development

Hey guys, Im fairly new to the company a new grad (<1 year experience in company). I work in Upstream in USA. Im obvs very new to this whole ranking system and raises and all. I see left right and center that our competitors (Supermajors as well as some smaller local American companies) are outright paying more in base salary and even offer sweet bonuses at year end pending company performance. I just went through my first 1v1 with my manager and was told that "hey dont worry about what other are paying in this region, they can pay higher salary and bonuses just know that you will outearn them all over the course of your life because of the sweet pension plan XOM has".
This kind of left me baffled, because im being old to stick it out so that over the course of my "life" i will outearn my competitors at other companies. What if i died 2 years into my retirement ???? What if this companies backtracks on Pension commitments like BP did to its retirees ??

Every year they will rank me against my "competitors" and based on that they will decided whether i should go on a PIP or not.......yeah seems like a nice excuse to introduce a lot of human bias. Over the course of your career you are bound to have ATLEAST one manager that hates your guts......what will you do then ??

I dont want to be in a position where one bad manager and PUFFF ur chances of succeeding at this company are finished. And also i want the higher pay and bonueses NOW.........life is uncertain so give me the absolutely max that you can NOW then i will invest it and even in a normal ETF S&P 500 i can make sooo much more out of that extra 20-30K now than have to wait for XOM to give me 20-30K in pension when im 65.....

Rant done.......im looking for an exit........Shell looks like a sinking boat just like BP...will be avoiding those.........but Chevron seems like a sweet deal.

See ya guys there !! Hahah

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To @OP+1q0VJ5sX : 🤡

OP, Chevron is a sinking boat…

Keep your resume up to date and always look for better career opportunities outside ExxonMobil. It is unlikely that you will be able to work for ExxonMobil to reach age 55 to receive a pension.

The Booz Allen's, McKenzie's, Boston Consulting Group... etc. will tell you that you will work for 10+ companies over a 30 year period in the 21st Century.

Not sure it is wise to believe it when management encourages you to defer your present concerns about salary because "things will turn in your favor in the long run" (decades away when you retire). To swallow this, you have to accept many assumptions, such as no future layoffs, survival of the company, keeping your morale high in spite of the corrupt evaluation system, management having genuine interest in your career, and company politics never impacting your progress. In other words, you must have the capacity to believe in fairy tales.

@1pbn What makes you think they want to change it, or that they should?

There’s a lot of people in all of these companies who have retired in place (RIP), and do practically nothing work-wise. I’m personally fine with that provided they stay quiet and don’t make much of a fuss. Without exception though, these “RIPs” or “ripes” as I like to call them are the biggest complainers in the building, throwing man-tantrums daily about the pettiest things imaginable, and lecturing everyone on how the business should be run. These people need to go, and they’re going.

Career dev is about your immediate super. Then you’re at that mercy of that person doing their job.

In EMRE (now EMTEC) 50% of our new hires have quit after the first five years. It has been that way for over thirty years.

Other major energy companies and petrochemical companies have similar employee retention.

That is life. No amount of "new" H/R and management initiatives is going to change the turnover frequency. If Dow, Dupont, 3M, Shell, Chevron, BP, Total and many others cannot change the fifty percent retention after five years, what makes us think that ExxonMobil is any smarter than our competititors.

Many new hires leave early if the culture doesn't suit them. Been that way with Exxon 36 years I know of. The fastest I've seen is a very sharp young guy join our department from CA and leave after 30 days. I think that's the record. No love lost, Company prefers you to leave if you realize it's a poor fit after joining.

You’re smart. You used a fake tone / misspelling so nobody could determine who you are. Everything you said and sense is spot on. Leave, it’s a scam.

OP, if you're really a new young hire YOU MUST LEAVE NOW. You'll be used as NSI material as soon as you are ranked. You were hired to protect the chosen ones. Period. Exxon doesn't care about you, your career, your anything. YOU MUST LEAVE NOW. You've been warned. Good luck.

Learning to spell would be a good start - advice vs advise.

@ldc You should have been here when Exxon employees in Spring equated open-office plans to human rights violations. This was done without any detectable irony.

Complaints about the quality of the office coffee, complaints about plastic utensils, complaints about when the bathrooms are cleaned…the list goes on forever. Of course, they’re all victims and are always being discriminated against, undermined, etc. Plenty of racism, s-xism, and homophobia thrown in for good measure.

I will never hire anyone with Exxon on their resume after reading what I’ve read here.

I’m sorry, but the mount of complaining on this board about XOM salaries is insane. I work for a large independent on the upstream side and make no where near in total compensation to what XOM pays. I have a 4 year degree and have been in the industry to 10 years and make at least $50k less and I’m on the higher side where I work.

Go back to school. Best option for you.

More fake posts from boomers/REs pretending to be “young people”.

The giveaway: nobody under 30 would start a thread with a wall of text like this.

Question: what are you guys trying to accomplish when you do this?

Thread regarding ExxonMobil Corp. layoffs

Advise on Career Development

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