Is it better to work for a small, medium or large company?

Jonathan Rigby
Sep 5, 2018 · 4 min read

I guess it depends on what you mean by better…

If we define a small company as less than 50 people, a medium company as less than 500 people and a large company as anything over that, then I have worked for all 3 types over my career. In fact my current employer has circa 20,000 employees.

There are obvious pros and cons for each and at times in my large company I have wished I worked for a smaller one, whereby things can maybe move quicker and vice versa at a small company that I would have the ability to focus on one thing and do it well, without being pulled in all directions, because we don’t have someone to perform that function.

Reflecting back though, I realise that each has provided me with distinct learning experiences that I maybe wouldn’t have had if I stayed with one type of company (not that I’d set out to achieve this variety of experiences), namely:

Small:

  1. Finance & the way a business operates. Small companies by nature are more volatile and susceptible to changes in market forces. I experienced many cycles of hiring and redundancies and the subsequent impact on employee morale and delivery taught me the need to plan and recruit sustain-ably.
  2. Working closely with senior people — There are many benefits of this in terms of learning, but for me it was seeing how effective senior leaders need to prioritise carefully and not try to do everything and the importance of building key relationships cross the business as well as with clients.
  3. Learning about areas you wouldn’t do in a larger company — This is more than just being a “jack of all trades.” For example, at my small company I learnt a lot about the need for good Employer Branding and even attended a conference on it (at a larger company that would all be handled by the recruitment team). I could then be a better recruiter as a Tech manager, rather than leaving that up to HR/Recruitment.

Medium:

  1. Build useful and meaningful relationships with people in different parts of the organisation. In a small company you obviously know everyone, but in a medium company there is still the ability to build strong meaningful relationships across the business (there are more moving parts) and leverage those relationships to action / support initiatives you want to implement.
  2. The need to have great employee engagement and motivation. At this company I saw the benefit of different initiatives centred around engagement and the positive effect it had as it caught on around the company (ie innovation time).
  3. Managers play a crucial role and should be trained well (and I don’t just mean attending training courses). I realised this in the absence of it, really. Some senior managers had ‘attended’ a lot of training courses but very little of it was implemented. Once a negative view of the management sets hold in a medium company, it can spread like wildfire through the organisation and you can have people running to the exit doors.

Large:

  1. I learned I needed a variety of communication methods as I couldn’t just walk across the office and relay/obtain information from my team /stakeholder every time. As a manager, making sure you are a constant conduit for that information both ways becomes even more important.
  2. Diversity of opinions. My large company gave a great deal of autonomy to teams in how they approached process and pieces of work. This meant I could learn different approaches and try things out. Obviously this can have a negative if you need to obtain a consensus, but that in turn helped me to be better at negotiation.
  3. You can try out more things / initiatives — there are more people to give it a go. We launched a leadership program at my large company that included things like a book club — something that probably wouldn’t have been easily possible at smaller companies.

Obviously, you probably don’t set out to work for all these 3 different types , but don’t rule a different company only out of the fear of the negatives you perceive will be there due to its size.

Written by

Technology Manager, triathlete (ahem), Open Water Swimmer

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade