Needs improvement - Custom Project Manager Cengage Employee Review

2.0
26 Oct 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Interesting work. Most people are friendly. CEO seems approachable and willing to listen to all employees.

Cons

The 1 or 2 percent merit increases for a rating of exceeds or far exceeds is a joke. What incentivizes us to work hard when we're not rewarded. Also your HR department favors managers over regular employees. Recent re-org in custom made employees have to reapply and interview for new role, and not allowed to keep senior status. The explanation for this was that we are moving into a new role. However managers who also moved into new role did not have to reapply/interview and were allowed to keep senior status. We verbally accepted the job offers, but have yet to receive a formal offer letter or any information about salary. It's been three weeks.

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Cengage Response
11y
Thanks for your comment and the chance to clarify the process for this job shift. We never assume that “managers don’t have to interview for new jobs but employees do.” When business leaders decide a change in direction is needed for a particular role or area of the organization, we conduct a thorough review with the business leaders, Human Resources, and our employment counsel. This review looks closely at the current roles in the given team, and what is expected to change between the existing jobs and any newly-created roles. If these past and future jobs are significantly different, employees (regardless of level) interview for any and all open jobs of interest to them. Sometimes employees decide to interview in a different part of the organization – not just for the newly-created roles. To specifically address your comment, the review team determined that the old and new managerial roles were so similar in this case that an interview process would be unnecessary. At Cengage, verbal offers are the norm for internal job changes. We hope that the trust we’ve built with our current employees continues to permit this practice. That said, we’ll talk to our employment counsel about other options. Since it sounds like you’ve received a verbal offer, I hope you will speak to your HR Partner or manager, so we can address your concerns, along with any specifics pertaining to your personal situation. Thanks!

Explore other reviews about Cengage

3.0
4 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
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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