Sinking Ship - Run while you still can. - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

1.0
Sep 19, 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

Company car CRM is home-grown but very functional Bi-annual bonus payouts Some of the products are industry standards and very in-demand

Cons

Bi-annual payouts are being used as a way to evaluate performance 2x a year therefore making it easy to fire employees much more quickly than before (3 years ave prior, 18 months ave now). Thinning of the herd appears to be directed at the "long-timers", reps who have been highly productive in the past, but due to territory shake-ups, find themselves needing to build a new customer base and only about a year to do it. Good excuse to fire very talented, but highly paid, employees. Constant layoffs and rehires are a shell game for investors to distract from the lack of achievement after bankruptcy. Company is financially very unstable. Products are incredibly over-priced; technology is being forced as the lower cost option rather than the actual solution (square peg, round hole). Promised products are not getting delivered leaving sales and marketing to deal with the fallout. Cronyism at its finest. New management teams were all brought over from same competitor; empty positions are being filled with lackeys from said competitor. HR is not your friend. Many colleagues made the mistake of expecting HR to help them, they are there to help the company and the management teams, not you.

Explore other reviews about Cengage

3.0
Jun 4, 2026
Recommend
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.

10
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