Meaningful work for unreasonable pay - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

2.0
Feb 8, 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

If you're passionate about education, it's wonderful going to work every day with similarly minded people. The work-life balance is still pretty great, even if it's gotten worse over the past few years (less flexible hours, less working from home, etc). Your coworkers are great people, many of the mid-managers genuinely care and want to help and look out for their employees.

Cons

As other people have said, the learning curve is STEEP. Plus, with all the reorgs and moves and lay-offs, we're severely understaffed and the staff we DO have is all new, unexperienced and overworked. However, the biggest problem by far is salary. Speaking as someone in a junior position in one of the most expensive cities in America, the salary is just not enough to live off of, especially considering how understaffed we are and how much our workload/responsibilities has expanded over the past two years. Once the hiring freeze is lifted, if you manage to find people who are willing to work for such a paltry sum they're most likely going to stay long enough to put it on their resumes, then leave for a company that's willing to pay them a livable wage. In the meantime, you're losing multiple people a week to similar companies who pay more, and out of the remaining people left, nearly everyone is job hunting.

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5.0
Mar 28, 2026
Recommend
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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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