Could range from great, to OK, to terrible, depending on your personality - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

3.0
Jul 30, 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

Work-life balance is a fact, here; there is no culture of working extra hours on a behind-schedule project to get things done, let alone being asked or required to do so. Instead, projects running behind will simply be scaled back, canceled, or postponed. The organization is working hard to transition from being a publishing powerhouse to being a digital content provider; the transition isn't going great but it's very hard for an organization this large, so it seems like it's going very well, all things considered. Some long-time staff are demoralized by it, though. Although some kinds of diversity aren't very well-represented (racial diversity is not totally lacking, but is not what it could be), the organization does have a diverse staff in many ways (gender, personality, age), so most people have a good chance of running across people to whom they can relate. Education is an exciting industry being transformed rapidly, so there's a lot going on. (For people looking for a steadier, more reliable situation, this could be a "con," though.) There are many idealistic staff who care a lot about education, although the few who are extremely idealistic sometimes run into disillusionment given that this is a for-profit enterprise.

Cons

The fact that projects running behind are deferred or postponed so often contributes to an air of unreality. Products are announced with great fanfare and dramatically scaled back; initiatives churn on with very little produced in relation to the resources consumed. Upper management is largely insulated from the rest of the organization, so unless you're middle management, it won't be your job to tell them things are behind, and the process that causes that to happen will remain invisible to you until your project is dramatically scaled back or canceled. (On the other hand, if you are middle management, you're in a dangerous position as the bearer of bad news.) Although "accountability" is said to be one of the core principles of the company "credo" (basically a statement of corporate values), no one seems to be held accountable for these things. This contributes to the sense that decisions are not made on the merits and upper-management personnel are not evaluated based on job performance. Sometimes, failures are not even acknowledged out loud; success is silently redefined as though the original promise was not made. This creates a breeding ground for cynicism and a sense that the work doesn't matter that much (or it wouldn't be casually postponed/canceled), so certain personality types don't work very hard here. Other personality types are driven completely nuts by the ever-changing plan, the frequent re-organzations, and/or the opaque decisionmaking process.

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5.0
Mar 28, 2026
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Pros

Total rewards, time off, great people and culture

Cons

Lots of changes and uncertainty at times

3.0
Jun 4, 2026
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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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