The best British companies to work for to get ahead
A new ranking of firms by pay, promotions and hiring practices
How companies in our index compare
Analysis of 151 employers in Britain in 2024. Controlling for
occupational mix within firms.
People want different things from employers: interesting work, decent pay and a sense of meaning are all sources of motivation. They also want the chance to progress: to gain a foothold on the career ladder and then to climb it. For several years the Burning Glass Institute, a non-profit organisation, has ranked American employers by how well they help their workers move on and up. Now, in partnership with The Economist, it has done a similar exercise in Britain. The British Opportunity Index uses publicly available data on 151 of the country's biggest and most recognisable employers. These firms employ 2.9m people between them, accounting for 9.4% of all the workers in Britain.
The Burning Glass Institute has analysed British career histories and trajectories using a proprietary database of 20m CVs and employment profiles drawn from sites such as LinkedIn. They fused this information with additional data on job advertisements from Lightcast, an employment-analytics company, along with salaries from Glassdoor, a website that encourages users to anonymously declare their earnings. Only those employers for which there are sufficient available data are included. The upshot is a picture of how much opportunity individual firms offer to British workers.
In order to compare companies across different industries on a like-for-like basis, the index controls for the occupational make-up of a firm. For example, the pay of an office administrator at Tesco, a supermarket which employs 315,000 people, is sure to be substantially different from that of a software developer at Amazon, an American technology behemoth that employs 75,000 people in Britain. But warehouse workers at both firms have more comparable levels of remuneration, promotion prospects and so on. The Burning Glass Institute therefore controls for the precise mix of occupations in every firm so that firms can be compared side-by-side.
Coca-Cola's British unit comes top of our pay metric not because it pays the absolute highest salaries but because it does best given the occupational mix of workers that it employs. Similarly, Vodafone, a mobile-phone network operator, comes top of our promotion measure not because it provides the absolute best chances of climbing the greasy pole but because it gives its staff the best opportunities for advancement after controlling for the type of jobs at the firm.
Explore our opportunity index
*For people without degrees or much experience.
Analysis of 151 employers in Britain in 2024. Controlling for
occupational mix within firms.
The index measures how employers do in four separate categories: access, promotion, retention and pay. The access category shows how open a firm is to hiring people without much experience. It ranks firms on two measures: the share of new hires who have fewer than three years' work experience, and the share of employees in the firm who do not appear to have a graduate degree. Many firms are beginning to realise that requiring university degrees can simply shrink the pool of talent available to them. But considerable variation remains. In the most accessible fifth of firms—those that rank highest on index—two-thirds of employees do not list any university degrees on their employment profiles compared with about one-third among the least-accessible fifth of firms.
Second, the index looks at employees' career-advancement prospects. It analyses four measures: how likely they are to get promoted within their existing organisation over a three-year period, and how frequently; how much more they are paid as a result (as a proxy for the quality of the promotion); and the probability that someone might find a job at another firm that pays at least 10% more than their existing salary. Again, there is a lot of variation across these measures. For example, we find that the best fifth of companies promote 17% of their staff over a three-year period, whereas the worst fifth promote only 8%.
The third pillar of the index looks at retention, which is measured using two metrics. First, the share of employees in the firm who have been promoted from within into positions that are in the highest 20% of earners at the company. Second, how likely it is that any given employee will stay with the firm for a period of at least three years. Among the worst-performing fifth of firms in our index, the likelihood that someone is still working for that company after three years is 45% compared with 71% in the best-performing fifth.
The fourth category in the index analyses pay. For the median employee in any given occupation at a company, The Burning Glass Institute has calculated both how much that employee is paid and by how much that salary has changed over the past year. For example, the top fifth of employers in our index pay data scientists an average of £73,000 ($92,000) a year compared with £38,000 for data scientists employed in the bottom fifth of firms. The gap between the highest- and lowest-paying employers is narrower in other occupations. Customer-service representatives earn £33,000 a year, on average, in the top fifth of employers, compared with £19,000 in the bottom fifth of employers.
Another way to view the index is to look at specific occupations. In the table below we have singled out eight jobs—customer-service agents; data scientists; financial managers; human-resources specialists; marketing managers; project managers; sales managers and software developers. Looking to get into software development in Britain? Amazon scores best for accessibility among the firms that have enough developers to be included in this cut of the data; if it is the pay cheque you care about, Man Group, an investment manager, remunerates most handsomely. Alternatively, if you want to work in customer services, the index suggests that you should target Taylor Wimpey, a housebuilder, if you don't have a university degree or Experian, a credit-checking firm, if you are looking to make rapid progress.
How companies compare if you’re a…
Customer-service agent
*For people without degrees or much experience.
As with any data exercise of this kind there are always important caveats. The strength of the index—that it uses public data rather than information supplied by employers—is also a weakness. It assumes that people are, by and large, honest about their employment histories. But in practice, what people say they have done on their CVs may not precisely map to what they have done in reality. Similarly, some workers may have a tendency to be dishonest about their earnings in online forums, and there may be sample bias in the types of people who volunteer such information. Firms may also recruit employees in ways that are not gleaned by Burning Glass Institute's analysis—which also means that the index may not adequately control for the occupation mix of a firm. And the index does not control for the financial performance of individual firms, which affects things like the growth of workforces and pay.
For these reasons, and others, the purpose of the index is not to anoint “Britain's best employer”. Indeed, one feature of the index is that some of the four categories appear to be independent of each other, or even to cut against each other. Firms that have the most generous pay policies tend to be those that are least accessible for non-graduates, for example; they do not necessarily score well for retention. What the index does reveal, for the first time, is how disparate the employment landscape in Britain is. Employers, including firms within the same industry, vary enormously in their labour-market practices. Lots of bosses gripe about inadequate skills and rising pay: the British opportunity index suggests that the best companies know how to control their own destiny.■
Sources: The Burning Glass Institute; company accounts; The Economist