A joke of a company - Content Developer Cengage Employee Review

2.0
24 July 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Most of the people in the trenches are genuinely lovely and want to help each other. There is a lot of flexibility with working from home.

Cons

This is a great place to work if you want to become poorer over time. You will never get a pay raise in line with inflation. Salary transparency is non-existent. Content developers with similar levels of experience are paid wildly different salaries for no apparent reason. The company cries poor when it comes to salary negotiations for individual contributors, but has bottomless budgets to promote inexperienced charlatans into director roles and hire the MD's mates as consultants. Some divisions have to work on shoe-string budgets with minimal staff, while other divisions have masses of inefficient, infighting staff that treat budgets like monopoly money. Your job will never be safe. Redundancies are endless and don't appear to be very strategic. Recently the company has gutted and offshored the permissions, finance and HR teams, which means it's only a matter of time before they are sued for one thing or another. They have offshored a tonne of production and editorial work to India, and this has resulted in delays, budget blow-outs, and a marked reduction in quality. In some cases offshore staff have jeopardised relationships with some of our most profitable authors. The business is well-aware of bullies in their management ranks and does nothing about it. Any individual contributor that brings up a genuine complaint is written off as crazy and mentally unstable. Content development has never been overseen by someone that actually knows what it is, which means this work is not valued. There are some people in the business that view content developers as glorified assistants and scapegoats instead of highly educated people that try our hardest to create high quality products that serve our customers.

avatar
Cengage Response
1y
I appreciate you taking the time to leave a review. I am happy to hear that you enjoy your co-workers and our benefits. As an organization we have worked hard to ensure our total rewards are competitive with the market and that staff are fairly compensated for the work they are responsible for. Our HR teams closely monitor the market to ensure our compensation is competitive. It’s true, we’ve recently been through a significant transformation, and – as part of our culture of continuous improvement -- we will continue to look for ways to increase profitability and simplicity. Although we have had to make difficult decisions about teams, including offshoring specific roles, I believe that this evolution in the way we work will eliminate many of the complexities and challenges our business faces and strengthen our business overall. At Cengage Group, we work hard to foster a safe and inclusive work environment and we take bullying claims seriously. I encourage you to submit a report through the Speak Up Line, so that we can learn more details and take the appropriate next steps. If you have any further feedback or suggestions on how we can improve, please feel free to reach out. Best, Morgan Wolbe, Executive Vice President, Global Operations and Chief Transformation Officer

Explore other reviews about Cengage

5.0
28 Mar 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Total rewards, time off, great people and culture

Cons

Lots of changes and uncertainty at times

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.

9
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All