As others have said, compensation is well below the market rate and raises are non-existent. Prepare for the CEO to assure you your pay is competitive, but don’t expect to ever see whatever metrics they’re looking at.
Cengage leadership wants to have their cake and eat it too: they want to be seen as a tech company but don’t want to invest in the actual tech or their employees. Prepare for sales to over-promise what the product can do, then turn around and berate you when you weren’t able to miraculously meet their unrealistic demands without additional budget or production time.
Then there’s the scope creep. Over my time at Cengage, the expectations for content manager responsibilities essentially doubled, with workloads increasing even more as people were unceremoniously laid off or rightfully quit. But did compensation rise accordingly? Of course not! Expect to be treated as though you are entitled for asking for any kind of raise, and prepare to be stuck with a stagnant salary that doesn’t come close to meeting annual cost of living increases.
To cap it off, the weekly CEO talks provide a regular serving of salt in your wounds. The C-suite loves to pat themselves on the back for appearing progressive, but will constantly hand-wave the frequent and highly upvoted questions about compensation, pay transparency, the continuing layoffs and resignations, and the company’s continuing support of redacted history in their Texas books (it’s a big market, after all, and for Cengage the bottom line ultimately trumps their veneer of progressive ethics). Expect to hear that they care about these issues, but never expect tangible action to meet their words. Instead, you will only receive indignation, with the CEO insisting all is well and that actually your pay is right where it should be! They’ll then return to the discussion of how important it is that students receive the training they need to get well paid and fulfilling jobs, training that just so happens to only fall into the categories of STEM and trades. I would strongly recommend that Michael considers how many roles at Cengage require a humanities background. Would he say that those roles are unfulfilling and don’t make great careers? Would the company function without authors, editors, designers, and other non-STEM creatives? Do these employees deserve a living wage that keeps up with inflation?
To get to the bottom line, if you cannot pay your employees fairly, there is something fundamentally wrong with your business model. Just don’t gaslight your workers and berate them for wanting better: they make the product, the CEO does not.
