NatGeo/ELT - Editor Cengage Employee Review

3.0
9 Sept 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great partnerships really provide opportunities to learn and influence the values of students worldwide to be responsible global citizens. There are some leaders in the upper layer who really care about the wellness of the wider team. Content is great and the wider group generally provides great support to the customers. Unpopular opinion perhaps, but I think the corporate communication internally is pretty good. CEO handled COVID really well while dealing with personal hardship, hats off to him.

Cons

A lot of ELT management does not walk the walk. We talk about environmentalism and DEI but meetings are a wasteland of single use plastic and passively racist comments. Things are so tight at Cengage overall and so many people have been let go, but the ELT management is still spending exorbitant amounts on business class flights and expensing every lunch while some team members can't even afford rent. It's a very self-congratulatory culture at the top; directors make unachievable commitments that they then pass off responsibility for keeping. The digital strategy is a mess and the digital product is kind of junk. We use the platform we chose because competitors use it, not because it's good.

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Cengage Response
1y
Thank you for taking the time to leave a review about your experience. I appreciate your positive comments about our great partnerships that provide learning opportunities for students worldwide. I am sorry to hear that you feel as though your work is not appreciated by managers and that you are working towards unrealistic expectations. I encourage you to discuss these issues more specifically with your manager and HR partner to ensure that your goals and focus area are enabling you to contribute in a manner that benefits the company and customers – and align with your career aspirations. Please also feel free to reach out to me directly. I also want to clarify that our ability to meet the moment and best serve students and educators, and our desire to increase our profitability, are not opposing objectives, in fact, they are highly co-dependent. Working smarter and more efficiently, we can continue our upward growth trajectory and achieve industry-leading profitability. This success will enable us to invest in new technology, products and services that will make a meaningful impact on a larger number of learners. It will also allow us to invest more deeply in employee growth and development. I recognize change can be uncomfortable and difficult, but I am confident we are taking the right steps to drive success for the business and scale our impact with learners around the globe. Best, Alexander Broich, President of Cengage Select and General Manager for English Language Teaching

Explore other reviews about Cengage

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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