And the Winner Is…

Morning Consult, “a media and technology company at the intersection of politics, policy, Wall Street, and business strategy” according to its web site, just released its ranking of the most admired employers.

The results are based on surveying over 220,000 adults, and the rankings are broken down by age, gender, education, political affiliation, geographic region, and income level.

The top five overall companies, in order, were

1. Google
2. Disney
3. Amazon
4. Apple
5. Microsoft.

If I were to list my top five favorite companies, those would be it. So I guess I’m not too different than the average American in regards to which companies I admire

When broken down into various categories, you can start to see some difference.

For gender, I’m much more closely aligned with women than men. Tesla seems like a cool company, but Harley Davidson probably would not even make my top 100 list.

For Political Party, I am more aligned with the Democrats, since the other two groups mention Harley Davidson.

For Education, it’s the same five companies for both Bachelor’s and Post graduate degree holders. Less than college includes Harley Davidson.

For age, I would be closely aligned with the Millennials. YouTube has replaced Apple in the top five (Apple is ranked 7th, after Netflix). As for the Baby Boomers, what’s with Lockheed Martin?

For Income, I’m much more aligned with the middle column, with Tesla replacing Microsoft in the highest income bracket.

For Geographic region, they all list the same five companies, except for the South, which has replaced Apple with Harley Davidson.

I’m not sure what all of the above really means, but I’m sure it’s no coincidence that of the top five overall companies listed, all of them except Disney are among the top five most valuable firms based on stock market value. The only company missing is Facebook, which is ranked fifth in market value. I am surprised that it never made the top five in any of the categories noted above (it didn’t even make the top 30 overall, which is all I can see on the Morning Consult web site).

It’s worth noting that Inc. claims that surveys like this are more a measure of brand familiarity and product attractiveness rather than an informed desire to work for a certain company.

Putting that caveat aside, I’d happily work at any of the overall top five companies. As to which would be my favorite place to work, how about mornings at Google and afternoons at Disney.