ultimately, or soon, this place will fall - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

1.0
Sep 21, 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

good office locations, decent salaries

Cons

on any day, this company has great brands and lots of talent to develop, produce, and sell products into the markets. so, day after day the business goes on. the CEO is charismatic and seems visionary, and some of his executive team are strong in their own pieces of the business. the chief product officer, however, is basically Donald Trump - a bullying buffoon whose actual knowledge of the education business (not medical or higher level science) is miniscule. he says things like "if only you [product developers] would start to innovate, I wouldn't have to fire another 50 people" instead of planning and managing innovation at a higher, systemic level where then patterns would be recognized by his product developers and results would follow. his team of executives live in constant stress, as do executives from other parts of cengage. there are few recognized, shared strategies, and the pieces of the business decidedly don't work with each other. it's not a good place to be.

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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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