• Consulting giant Ernst & Young has secured the top spot on LinkedIn Australia’s 2021 Top Companies list.
• The Big 4 giant earned plaudits for not enforcing redundancies through 2020, and offering to reimburse staff who underwent paycuts.
• The list recognised 25 companies LinkedIn believes offer strong career progression and opportunities to staff.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

Consulting giant Ernst & Young (EY) has secured the #1 ranking on LinkedIn Australia’s 2021 Top Companies list, earning plaudits for avoiding layoffs during a year of brutal business conditions.

LinkedIn’s fifth annual list, revealed Wednesday, sees the Big 4 firm stand above 24 other companies, each judged on their ability to foster the professional lives of their employees.

EY was recognised for retaining its estimated 8,300-strong workforce through the worst industry shutdowns of 2020 — and pledging to partially reimburse staff who took pay cuts — while its main competitors shed staff.

“When everyone else was shedding jobs amongst the pandemic, they really did everything that they could to hold on to their team, which staff were obviously grateful for,” Capucine Yeomans, managing editor of LinkedIn News Australia, told Business Insider Australia.

Remarkably, EY has surged up 13 places since its 2019 ranking, unseating Westpac Group for the top berth.

Optus ranked #2, earning praise for ‘Optus U’, a recent initiative offering staff the opportunity to bolster their skillsets with custom courses developed by La Trobe University and Macquarie University.

Macquarie Group secured the third spot, with LinkedIn noting its policy welcoming employees after protracted breaks from the workplace.

Nascent medical device manufacturer ResMed and the comparatively enormous Commonwealth Bank rounded out the top five.

The top 25 firms occupy different sectors but were united by a focus on employee wellbeing, Yeomans said.

“It really was that initiation of flexible working arrangements, wellbeing hubs, providing resources for creating productive home work environments, offering pandemic lead leave for those in care roles, such as working parents,” Yeomans said.

“They were doing all of this while continuing to help their workers grow their careers effectively, which, potentially, some of the others [companies] weren’t doing quite as successfully.”

While companies earned plaudits for retraining initiatives — and, in the case of Woolworths Group, “rescaling and redeployment programs” to mitigate the disruption brought by automation — the LinkedIn list recognised the value of gender diversity within the workforce.

“Diversity is a key hiring pillar for the top companies,” Yeomans said.

“So a lot of them, if not all of them, have set targets for gender equity, especially in those senior roles.”

For its fifth annual list, LinkedIn assessed “the career paths of millions of global professionals” to rank the companies on seven criteria.

Firms were judged for the ability for employees to advance their careers and build their skills, and on company stability — which saw companies with attrition and layoffs of more than 10% excluded, effectively making the ranking a de facto list of companies which effectively weathered the economic crisis.

LinkedIn also assessed recruiter demand for employees, and judged the strength of company culture by analysing LinkedIn connections between staff.

Finally, eligible companies were judged on the variety of educational backgrounds among staff, and, for the first time, the gender diversity exhibited in their workforces.

“What we’re really saying with all of our top companies is they’re really setting up their employees for success,” Yeomans added.

“They’re making investments in their workforces.”

• EY
• Optus (Singtel)
• Macquarie Group
• ResMed
• Commonwealth Bank
• Bosch
• Woolworths Group
• IBM
• Amazon
• Google (Alphabet)
• UBS
• Salesforce
• NAB
• Westpac Group
• ABB
• Allianz
• Atlassian
• QBE Insurance
• Origin Energy
• Wesfarmers
• Bayer
• McKinsey & Company
• Omnicom
• Deloitte
• Medtronic

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