Big Company Or Small Company?
QUESTION:
“Dear Pete: Big company or small company? What are the pros and cons of working for each?”
PETE’S ANSWER:
Here’s the short answer: Size matters.
Working for an employer with 27 total employees will be a very different experience than working for an employer with 27,000 total employees. It’s similar to attending a major state school with 50,000 students versus a small liberal arts college with less than 1,000 students. As a result, spend some time reflecting on what you liked or disliked about your collegiate environment. Here are four benefits (in general) of working for a small company (i.e. less than 100 employees) and four benefits (in general) of working for a big company (i.e. 100-10,000 employees, or more).
Benefits of working for a small company:
- Greater individual impact. Smaller employers often give new employees more responsibility at the start, simply because they have fewer people on staff. This can be rewarding since you can wear a lot of different hats, run your own projects, and even start projects of your own, all of which make it very easy to see the impact of your work.
- More day-to-day variety. In many cases, your day-to-day responsibilities can be much more diverse at a smaller organization. Many smaller employers also give their employees more freedom to determine how to get their work done.
- More intimacy with colleagues. Because there are fewer employees, it’s more likely you will get “face-time” with key executives and that you will get to know most of your colleagues when working for a small employer.
- Faster growth potential. Smaller organizations usually have less bureaucracy and less complicated organizational structures. As a result, you can usually move up faster in a small organization; large organizations usually have much more deliberate (i.e. slow) processes of promoting from within.
Benefits of working for a big company:
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