Great work/life balance and atmosphere, terrible management and direction
Pros
For work/life balance, you can't get much better than Cengage. Managers are typically very open to accommodating your schedule (work from home days, flex hours, etc.). The office is very relaxed (jeans every day, cookie day, birthday parties, etc.) and there is a general sense of camaraderie. If you just want to come into work everyday, put in your 7.5 hours and not care about the quality of the projects you are working on, or the quality of the company you work for, this is the place for you. Publishing is considered a "pink collar" industry, where women can often reach the higher tiers of management.
Cons
The direction of the company is all over the place. The management is poor. The general rule is the higher up you climb, the less you have to know. Upper managers generally do not know what is going on and are disconnected to people tasked with executing their arbitrary ideas. Instead of supporting existing processes or products to address market needs and to make actually useful products, as a general rule we jettison wholesale what is not working, in favor of promising an overambitious, unfeasible, unattainable plan. If this isn't bad enough we promise it to the reps and public, and so then are left scrambling to make a product with little resources or knowledge just to satisfy a promise we had no right to make in the first place. We are constantly scrambling to keep in line with the competition and the products we make fall short. The sales reps are clueless, but I can't really fault them because our product model is all over the place, and often times the managers and project managers can't even articulate what makes our product valuable, or even to differentiate it from the plethora of subpar products that we have. Communication between upper management and employees is poor. There is always a general sense that something is going on that we don't know about. And there always is. And it always affects us dramatically. And we never have any say in it. There have been so many reorgs I've lost track. Each with the promise of making us more streamlined and have our opinions be heard, none of which actually happens. Because this is a "pink collar" industry, there is a lot of touchy-feely stuff. I had to have an hour long meeting with a colleague because her feelings were hurt. This is not elementary school, this is a business. An hour out of my day to talk about feelings would never happen in finance, or any other industry. Suck it up! There are SO many meetings, it is impossible to get anything done. After each meeting plans change and so you are constantly re-configuring your plan and the product/end game ends up a sloppy mess.
