The beatings will continue until morale improves - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

Thanks. As you likely expect, I do disagree on a few points, and I would like to share a few facts with you that underpin my belief. We are indeed, as you note, in transition from a former publishing company to a much more technology-driven organization. Different kinds of skills are needed than in the past. Many employees have successfully made the transition to new jobs and new ways of working. Tech support is actually a good example. We’ve built a team for this from scratch, combining existing talent and new recruits. Our wait times have seen a decrease of 22% over the last two years and now average under 2.5 minutes at peak times (as you will know, we are a very seasonal business with massive peaks of demand at the beginning of the semester, usually on Sunday nights). In fact, tech support has earned a 97.3% customer satisfaction rating so far this year, and we have teams of software engineers who strive to “design out” the questions we receive. I’m not sure I follow your comments on headcount reductions. When there are changes, we want to remake how we work to become better at creating what our customers want – which is, increasingly, educational software. We have so many jobs and new roles posted that it’s hard to see the correlation that you are making. Needless to say (I hope), replacing aging workers with younger ones for less pay is not merely bad business, as you note, but it’s also illegal. I agree that we need more Talent programming to help grow our employees, which is why it is a significant priority for me this year. Our new Talent team is already rolling out added learning and development opportunities, with much more to come. I recognize, however, that this may be too late for you, as you have departed Cengage. I sincerely hope your next opportunity is a better fit for you and that you also shared specific feedback .