Great Colleagues; Poor Leadership in a Sea of Bad Decisions - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

1.0
Jan 28, 2019
Anonymous employee
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

Talented coworkers; solid efforts to create camaraderie in the office

Cons

My observations and opinion: Constant changes to company structure and lack of communication between departments at highest echelons results in costly delays and general confusion. Recent announcements deleteriously affecting several hundred employees have been treated as business-as-usual and the scope and seriousness are being downplayed to other offices. There appears to be a lack of responsibility for poor decisions in the direction of the company which has angered and saddened those affected by the changes announced last week. The outsourcing of many crucial projects to vendors has been nightmarish for product teams. Hiring freezes, inability to advance, and low compensation compared to other companies in educational technology mean that talent are going elsewhere.

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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
Recommend
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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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