An excellent place for Marketers, a good place for Business people, but a poor choice for Technical people.
Pros
P&G's size and scope offer an interesting opportunity to work and interact with a wide range of people around the world, most of which are bright, engaging individuals from a diverse background. The assignment-based career system gives employees an opportunity to easily move around within the company, building a diverse portfolio of experiences to go along with the wide range of individuals you are likely to meet. Even switching functions (say from R&D to IT or Finance to HR) is possible, albeit rare for some of the more prestigious functions (switching to Marketing is no small feat). Due to this, an individual who wishes to build a broad view of a huge company can do so, although it will take time as assignments are normally at least two years in length. The promote-from-within culture of the company also leads to a consistency in leadership that can be welcoming, but also stifling when the culture requires changing. Training for middle-management seems to be spotty across business units and functions, but in general, careers are long and this tends to foster a professional, team-based approach to issues as backstabbing typically comes back to haunt those that engage in it. While the company no longer supports its "Job for Life" credo that it did a few decades ago, wide-spread layoffs remain rare, although having your brand sold to another company is always a threat. Additionally, while benefits have been cut in recent years, most of them still remain better than average, with the Employee Profit Sharing plan standing high amongst most other retirement packages, should you end up staying long enough to benefit from it.
Cons
It's a huge company, which carries all the headaches that come with such a designation. Due to the heavy focus on marketing within the company, many projects live or die based not on merit or data but how well they are marketed internally. Most decisions are made through a system of advocacy and politics-based networking, often with committees being final approvers rather than individuals; which frequently leads to a lack of accountability when things go awry. Senior management's primary role seems to be constantly re-organizing the company, often not changing how any of the work gets done within the organization, but just the reporting lines at the top and costing methods involved; claiming huge savings for the company while moving around the ever-shifting empire borders at the top three or four levels of the company. While the company's benefits and compensation packages have remained competitive over the years, the same cannot be said about the work environments at many of the technical centers. While corporate headquarters in downtown Cincinnati have been maintained and remodeled, many of the technical centers leave the impression of decline rather than growth through their extremely dated facilities, poor HVAC systems, power outages, expensive cafeterias with terrible food, conference rooms without network access (or sometimes even phones) and other issues that detract from the work environment experience. Lastly, the company has heavily pursued a strategy of out-sourcing in the last ten years, which may have been over-invested in and again focuses too much on short-term gains. Due to the focus on external partnerships and out-sourcing, most internal technical personnel and knowledge is grossly under-valued. Across R&D, Engineering and IT, this type of work is to be purchased and managed, not developed. Managing these partners will only get more difficult as those experienced personnel (who had the opportunity to develop their skills before the out-sourcing push) leave the company and are replaced by managers who have no background in actually doing the work they are managing.
