Pros
People are at UL for the job security and predictable work day (out at 5, bye!), though this might change, depending on what industry you're in. Generally, though, layoffs are not frequent. Colleagues are genial. Pay and benefits are comparable to other sectors for certain types of engineers (say, electrical engineers in construction), and much lower for other types (say, electrical engineers in the SV semiconductor industry). Work isn't technical at all, but does teach you much about project management and customer service, which is valuable in the engineering industry. UL does recognize it needs to change to survive, so that's a good thing. The hard part is figuring out how to do it. Certification and sustainable business growth are tough things to mix together -- hence our constantly failing acquisitions, losing our core businesses to lower-priced, just-good-enough competitors, inability to figure out how to remove certification steps to reduce costs, etc.
Cons
TL;DR -- Very bureaucratic, not enough managements skills to figure out how to make good money in the certification business (if it's at all possible), boring work. Also, too many acronyms. Long version - This is a very bureaucratic, one-time monopolistic company, and thus filled with everything that comes with such a company -- average management with limited power to change things, departmental silos, boring technical work, avalanches of paperwork, limited promotion opportunities. If you're an engineer doing certification reports, be prepared to do it for the next 30-40 years. The middle managers have come up through the ranks and worked nowhere else, so they're mostly unimaginative, and thus always latching onto the latest process improvement techniques for production lines without really understanding it. (Hint -- doesn't really work for certification work.) It's like that old game of telephone, with the Harvard Business School blog at one end and UL at the other -- it's almost funny how ineptly we end up applying the latest business concepts, or more accurately, applying new business jargon to the same thing we've always done. C-level management folks usually do say the right things, but the implementation is sorely lacking. Not anyone's fault -- everyone is beholden to one process or another. In the end, it's certification work reviewed by outside auditors, so it's very risk averse, and UL generally rewards plodding types who can follow processes and rules without question, and who can work up -- if not a love, but a resigned acceptance -- of their TPS reports. I realize that sounds overly harsh, but I don't really mean it that way -- just that they're the types that can generally survive here, because there's much more documentation than engineering going on. Other personality types might be seen as cutting corners and risking safety. We are told to change things we can control, and not to worry about the things we can't, but it's a somewhat deflating thought to realize you don't control much beyond the angle of your seat back. UL is mostly filled with either engineers who didn't get job offers from other companies out of school, or those who made a mistake by joining after working somewhere else and now can't get job offers from other companies, or those that have been here 40 years and can't remember how they got the job in the first place. (Now this isn't quantified, obviously, and said in jest, obviously, too, but it's my general impression talking to a good amount of engineers over the years.) UL engineers are generally not recruited for much beyond certification positions, and only in certain industries, even though I do believe many are very accomplished project managers and generalist engineers. One last thing -- we rival the military with our capacity to come up with inane acronyms. Sometimes we have the same acronym refer to about 3-4 different things. Good luck figuring that out.