DRC|CTB Reviews

3.1

40% would recommend to a friend

(93 total reviews)

Ellen Haley

62% approve of CEO

17% positive business outlook

DRC|CTB has an employee rating of 3.1 out of 5 stars, based on 93 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The DRC|CTB employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Education industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

93 reviews
1.0
13 Apr 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Challenging work, with a built-in mandated set of customers that need your product. Robust established mainframe infrastructure for providing that product, and an on-call group of on-demand slaves (Kelly workers) to do your bidding. Good food in the cafeteria. Nice location.

Cons

Completely incompetent posturing hack layer of middle managers. Practically every middle manager there has 25-30 years in with the company, but it's one year experience 25 or 30 times over. A slavish devotion to "rules", and all of them are just marking time until retirement. They are absolutely unemployable elsewhere, and since they're too old to join the Army and live off the Government, or can't get on shuffling papers at the DMV, CTB is about it. There is a reason this company ex-division of McGraw-Hill has bled money since 2005. At that time they were almost 1000 people and the industry leader, and now they are approaching less than 300, and losing $ every quarter. Upper management is too obtuse or uncaring to realize that their usually good initiatives to improve service and performance are met with lip-service by the core layer of middle-management hacks, who then quietly go about sabotaging things. Their favorite two phrases are: 1) "We don't do it that way here.", and 2) "That's never been tried before." Virtually all of the competent managers had been fired or quit, or were micro-managed to death, leaving only the posturing incompetents in charge, a couple of which don't even have actual High School diplomas, by the way, just GED's. McGraw-Hill Corporate in NY saw the handwriting on the wall a couple of years ago, and divested themselves of the CTB turkey. If you want to be a wage slave in the epitome of a corporate drudgery environment, drinking crappy coffee and begging for supplies, while being micro-managed to death by hacks, then go for it. Otherwise, do yourself a favor and get a job handing out towels in a house of ill-repute, or digging ditches. Either would be preferable to putting up with people who don't care about their employees, don't care about the success of their company, and most importantly, DON'T care about their State Department of Education customers, or the children in those states that must take their tests.

1.0
28 July 2015

Contracts and Permissions

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Unfortunately, there were not a lot of positive things about working at CTB. Some of the details are listed in the "Cons" section.

Cons

Before I went to work at CTB, a former employee told me that CTB was the most messed up, unorganized and terrible place to work. I wrote that off, thinking the person must have been angry, had a bad boss or something like that. After all, no place is THAT bad. I thought, maybe there were some bad departments, but the whole place can't be that bad. I was wrong. There is absolutely NO work life balance. The few good executives were laid off and the rest are concerned more about gathering statistics than productivity. Management will say that the REASON they gather statistics is to increase productivity, so they make you spend a lot of time on lean/six sigma projects that take up A LOT of time. Unfortunately, the management does nothing with the results. CTB actually repeated two different projects while I worked there because they forgot the projects had been done previously. They did nothing with the four projects' results! A complete waste of productivity and time. Each department follows its own rules, so there is no cohesiveness throughout the company. If you will work with more than one department, you will need to learn how each department does the same task in completely different ways. You will spend a lot of time on busy work, projects that sit in files unread and more tasks like that. The pieces of the puzzle do not work together and it is incredibly frustrating. If you like spinning your wheel in mud and hitting your head against a brick wall just to get a paycheck, you will love CTB. Otherwise, save yourself the grief. I really wish I had.

3.0
23 Jan 2016

Good while it lasted; sad to see such an end

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Fantastic colleagues, challenging work, stimulating environment, good products.

Cons

Constant and major shifts in political environments at local, state, and federal levels put devastating pressures on the business. Upper management failed to find a way to be profitable under the circumstances and failed to successfully address technology issues in moving to a fully digital age. Dissipated a once thriving and excellent company that led the field in quality and integrity for decades.

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Glassdoor has 118 DRC|CTB reviews submitted anonymously by DRC|CTB employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if DRC|CTB is right for you.