Atmosphere of Fear - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

1.0
Jan 20, 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

Generous time off benefits. Salaries in some areas are competitive. Product line offers (but seldom delivers) at least the *chance* of working towards a cause you can be proud of (education). Generally speaking most colleagues are progressive and intelligent.

Cons

Senior management has absolutely no vision of what the company needs to be. Years after emerging from bankruptcy the talk is still about starting over. The highest level of leadership relies on a story of inheriting a mess that they are still getting ready to address incrementally. There are no products to get really excited about -- just ask a college student. The company also has a history of sweeping layoffs and position closures. Google what they did with IT in the fall of 2015. It would be one thing if these changes resulted in positive changes and forward progress but the frequency of them and the scattershot approach tells a different story. The individual contributors at most locations operate in an atmosphere of fear over losing their jobs, and they do this based on watching colleagues disappear with regularity. The amount of politics that go on there makes Washington DC look like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, too. Meetings packed with spectators disguised as stakeholders, territorial wars to hold onto bs processes and functions, constant reference to "this is how it's always been done."

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.

9
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