Big corporate publisher living in a mean little bubble. - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

2.0
16 Aug 2013
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

With hard work and passion for education, I was able to move up swiftly.

Cons

It's funny that I just received my letter about Cengage's bankruptcy today...I've been thinking lately how different my life is now working for a company with a culture of accountability, kindness and recognition of true achievement. My memories of Cengage generally center around the mean clique of middle to upper managers who had been with the company for years and years and had no discernible worry about performance or innovation. Years of observing superiors taking advantage of the company's flexible work policies, abuse of expense accounts, rewarding cronies for strategies that yielded no results and taking advantage of the lower-level, hard working employees is what I remember first. But in the wake of the bankruptcy, I see all of this in context: editors and marketing directors truly felt that they knew everything and didn't need to do any market research, review their competitor's technology or content or put in the effort to innovate. They knew that they could not be fired that within the crony culture of the company, it was not necessary to perform, work too hard or meet any particular goal. Nothing changed, nothing was fixed, students interests were not a priority.

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3.0
4 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Company has some interesting approaches to the market and in the past they seemed value employees. There are some good employees there and there was, in the past, visionary leadership, but the people with the vision and leadership skills left the company a few years ago.

Cons

The company actively de-values employees. They had a project they called "Project Horizon" where they told all employees they needed to cut costs, so the company was going to have multiple layoffs over 3-5 years - but nobody was allowed to know when, where, or why - - just one day large swaths of people would be gone. That hung over everyone's heads - for years, and is indicative of how Cengage values employees - it doesn't. Everything is about trying to secure new funding and prepare for an IPO, so they stopped investing significantly in the products about 3 years ago and that's about when they stopped acting like they cared about employee wellness as well.

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