Company details

Charlotte, NC

HEADCOUNT

10000+

ORG TYPE

Corporate

SECTOR

Energy & Climate

WEBSITE

https://www.duke-energy.com/

About the company

Duke Energy is a large U.S. electric power holding company with regulated utilities and natural gas distribution. The company’s electric utilities serve customers across North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, and the company also operates natural gas utilities serving parts of the Carolinas, Tennessee, Ohio, and Kentucky. Duke Energy owns a large generation fleet and grid infrastructure, with ongoing investment across reliability, clean energy, and system modernization. Duke Energy also operates corporate functions in areas like IT, cybersecurity, finance, supply chain, and engineering.

Locations and presence

Duke Energy is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, with major operations across the Carolinas, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. Work setup depends heavily on role, but corporate roles are often described by employees as hybrid (commonly 3 days in-office, 2 days remote), while field and plant roles are largely on-site.

Palpable Score

72.3

/ 100

Duke Energy is relatively accessible for early-career candidates because the company runs sizeable paid internship and co-op hiring across many functions and has evidence of intern-to-career pathways. Duke Energy also looks reasonably structured in selection due to common use of panels, screening calls, and pre-employment checks, but the company publishes limited end-to-end candidate guidance and inconsistent pay-range transparency. The biggest cap on the score is missing outcomes reporting such as intern conversion rates, early-tenure retention, and time-to-promotion.

Pillar 1: Early-career access

Score

17.0

/ 20

The company hosted more than 250 interns in one summer across departments such as accounting, legal, supply chain, customer delivery, renewables, transmission, IT, and environmental health and safety.
Duke Energy posts recurring internships and co-ops with clear seasonal timing, including Summer 2026 internship listings across multiple tracks.
The company offers longer-horizon student pathways in some areas, including multi-semester craft internships with rotations through different work areas.

Pillar 2: Hiring fairness and transparency

Score

13.0

/ 20

The company’s commonly reported stages include phone interviews, group panel interviews, skills tests, and pre-employment steps like background checks and drug tests.
Duke Energy has a largely positive interview experience signal in aggregated candidate feedback, including a majority reporting a positive experience and moderate difficulty.
The company provides limited public, official detail on timelines, assessment expectations, and feedback norms, which makes the process feel predictable mainly through third-party reports rather than first-party clarity.

Pillar 3: Learning and support

Score

14.0

/ 20

The company’s internship postings explicitly promise career development support, including training programs, mentorship opportunities, and career development resources.
Duke Energy has evidence of structured rotation-style early-career development in at least some functions, including multi-year rotational pathways referenced publicly by participants.
The company shares fewer concrete, repeatable details on onboarding and mentorship assignment for entry-level full-time roles across the whole business, 13so consistency is hard to verify outside internships and specific programs.

Pillar 4: Pay fairness and stability

Score

15.3

/ 20

The company offers a defined retirement package with clear formulas, including company matching contributions and an employer retirement contribution (for employees not active in a company pension plan) equal to 4% of eligible pay per pay period.
Duke Energy maintains defined benefit retirement plan documentation for some employee groups, alongside medical and other standard large-employer benefits, which supports stability.
The company does not consistently publish pay ranges in widely visible early-career postings, so candidates often have to rely on estimates rather than first-party salary transparency.

Pillar 5: Early-career outcomes

Score

13.0

/ 20

The company has stated that more than 900 Duke Energy employees started as interns, which is a concrete signal of internships feeding long-term employment at meaningful scale.
Duke Energy has solid but not perfect employee sentiment signals on career outcomes, with “career opportunities” sitting around the upper-middle range in review aggregates rather than at the top end.
The company has public LinkedIn profile patterns showing early-career hires moving through rotational or associate programs into longer-term roles, but Duke Energy does not publish cohort outcomes like conversion rates, early-career retention, or time-to-promotion.