Cengage reviews

2.9

32% would recommend to a friend

(2,399 total reviews)
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Michael Hansen

41% approve of CEO

25% positive business outlook

Cengage has an employee rating of 2.9 out of 5 stars, based on 2,399 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The Cengage employee rating is 22% below average for employers within the Mídia e comunicação industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
2.0
Jul 24, 2024

A joke of a company

Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

Most of the people in the trenches are genuinely lovely and want to help each other. There is a lot of flexibility with working from home.

Cons

This is a great place to work if you want to become poorer over time. You will never get a pay raise in line with inflation. Salary transparency is non-existent. Content developers with similar levels of experience are paid wildly different salaries for no apparent reason. The company cries poor when it comes to salary negotiations for individual contributors, but has bottomless budgets to promote inexperienced charlatans into director roles and hire the MD's mates as consultants. Some divisions have to work on shoe-string budgets with minimal staff, while other divisions have masses of inefficient, infighting staff that treat budgets like monopoly money. Your job will never be safe. Redundancies are endless and don't appear to be very strategic. Recently the company has gutted and offshored the permissions, finance and HR teams, which means it's only a matter of time before they are sued for one thing or another. They have offshored a tonne of production and editorial work to India, and this has resulted in delays, budget blow-outs, and a marked reduction in quality. In some cases offshore staff have jeopardised relationships with some of our most profitable authors. The business is well-aware of bullies in their management ranks and does nothing about it. Any individual contributor that brings up a genuine complaint is written off as crazy and mentally unstable. Content development has never been overseen by someone that actually knows what it is, which means this work is not valued. There are some people in the business that view content developers as glorified assistants and scapegoats instead of highly educated people that try our hardest to create high quality products that serve our customers.

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Cengage Response
1y
I appreciate you taking the time to leave a review. I am happy to hear that you enjoy your co-workers and our benefits. As an organization we have worked hard to ensure our total rewards are competitive with the market and that staff are fairly compensated for the work they are responsible for. Our HR teams closely monitor the market to ensure our compensation is competitive. It’s true, we’ve recently been through a significant transformation, and – as part of our culture of continuous improvement -- we will continue to look for ways to increase profitability and simplicity. Although we have had to make difficult decisions about teams, including offshoring specific roles, I believe that this evolution in the way we work will eliminate many of the complexities and challenges our business faces and strengthen our business overall. At Cengage Group, we work hard to foster a safe and inclusive work environment and we take bullying claims seriously. I encourage you to submit a report through the Speak Up Line, so that we can learn more details and take the appropriate next steps. If you have any further feedback or suggestions on how we can improve, please feel free to reach out. Best, Morgan Wolbe, Executive Vice President, Global Operations and Chief Transformation Officer
2.0
Jul 24, 2024

Sad to see the decline

Anonymous employee
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

The employees were the best part of Cengage Group, there has been and still are some really talented people there, unfortunately leadership does not seem to see or notice the talent enough to want to keep, support or encourage growth! The ERGs were also excellent but again, people run and not very well supported by the company.

Cons

Cengage was a great place to work at the start! But in the past year has gone through MASSIVE changes. Large amounts of outsourcing or closing jobs and readvertizing them with less pay, completely gutting areas of the company, an entire year of limbo knowing job cuts are coming but not sure when. Really sad to see the company heading in this direction, absolutely profits over people focused.

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Cengage Response
1y
Thank you for taking the time to leave a review.  I do not take lightly the evolution that we have gone through over the last year. As a company, we faced an inflection point where we needed to reassess our structure to enhance our efficiency and effectiveness. This is critical to allowing us to invest in the business and meet the needs of customers. This means that, in some cases, we had to make difficult decisions that impact employees as we looked to remove duplicity in the businesses and shift to a shared services model. Our credo and ethos have remained central to our decision-making and serve as a guidepost for our business trajectory. Regarding transparency, creating opportunities for candid conversations is a top priority for me and the entire executive team. We look to do this through several channels, including our First Friday sessions and departmental town halls. I always welcome feedback on how we can help answer questions or clarify direction in these forums. Best, Michael Hansen, CEO
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