Archives for Biggest Employers

A friend of mine abdicated her executive throne at a multinational corporation to pursue her dreams of working for a small, non-profit organization. Once there, however, she came to a difficult realization: she prefers the perks and resources of a larger enterprise.

I had the opposite awakening one day in the back row of a college class packed with 700 freshmen students. Large universities aren’t well-suited for every type of student: what they offer in scale they also sacrifice in intimacy. The same dichotomy applies to choosing an employer.

Although bigger isn’t always better, we developed My Global Career 500, the first directory of the world’s largest corporate employers, keeping in mind the virtues of working for large employers.

The tradeoffs are pretty clear: Large companies tend to be more structured, hierarchical and standardized in their operations than small or midsize firms. Large companies have more resources but also impose more bureaucracy than smaller ones. Generally it is more competitive to land a job at a proven company than at a younger enterprise (with the notable exception of hot high-tech firms).

Yet, once in, there are more opportunities to advance your career in large companies, here’s why:

• You’re more likely to receive better benefits such as training or profit sharing
• You have more options to relocate or try different jobs
• Large companies may have programs to advance diversity and multiculturalism
• Large enterprises are often global in scope and have more jobs with global responsibilities and interaction.

There are always exceptions and in the future we will spotlight employment in small and midsize companies that compete in the global economy - firms such as suppliers, service firms or distributors.

Gone are the days when working for a large employer guaranteed more job security than smaller firms could offer. Flux is the new career steady state. In the course of several months spent compiling My Global Career 500, we counted more than a dozen mergers and acquisitions, watched firms declare bankruptcy or announce severe losses, and experienced the churn of employers expanding or contracting headcount.

What can you do with this free resource? Go exploring! Apart from identifying leading employers in thirty-three countries and twenty-eight industries, each listing includes separate links to the firm’s corporate domain and job site. Altogether, My Global Career 500 companies employ more than 45 million people. Assuming a conservative 2% job vacancy rate, that gives you a rough idea of how many positions are available through these job site links.

While most corporate rankings capture a snapshot in time, we intend to update this list regularly as we discover new information about these global enterprises. Let us know what we can do to make the first list of the world’s largest corporate employers more valuable to you.