Great Employees, Clueless Management - Content Developer Cengage Employee Review

2.0
Jul 17, 2019
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

The employees in the trenches, the ones doing the actual work, are fabulous. The flexibility (being able to work from home one day a week, etc.) is also fabulous. I even enjoy the actual work.

Cons

The payscale has absolutely *no* transparency (even my supervisor doesn’t know what the pay range of my position is, let alone me), and raises, which have been capped at 1% a year for at least the last five years, were cut to 0.5% this year. (2019) No bonuses at all for employees not in management or sales.

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Cengage Response
6y
Feedback is key to our efforts to continually improve, so thanks for your post. If you’d like to reach out to me directly, I’m eager to learn more about your experience. And I’d be happy to provide context regarding our approach to compensation and improvements already being made to reward top performers, increase transparency and ensure we are offering competitive pay across all roles. In the meantime, I do want to offer one correction here. Specifically, raises for the company have NOT been capped at 1% in any of the last five years. We have always had variable adjustments that allow us to pay for performance and it remains a central pillar of our compensation philosophy. Thanks again.

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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.

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