Great people, terrible everything else. Don't bother. - Account Executive - Inside Sales Cengage Employee Review

1.0
Jul 15, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Fully remote - Excellent work/life balance - Warm and professional culture

Cons

- Zero job security. Even when you consistently overperform on sales goals and maintain flawless standing with the company's conduct, they will have reoccurring "organizational restructures" that cost people their jobs to keep investors happy. - Pay plan is unrewarding. The only way to make decent money is to drastically overperform. The effort you put forth to make 120k here will get you 150-200k elsewhere if you're truly good at sales. - Bonus structure is unfair and unreliable. There are several factors you have no control over that can prevent you from being paid at all, like poor revenue reporting, or certain products no longer being offered. You cannot control these things, yet they will impact your revenue and put your bonus at risk. - Lack of transparency and honesty. Leadership will say one thing, but their true motives are never apparent until changes start happening that don't align with what was communicated. This happens consistently and makes it impossible to trust them.

Explore other reviews about Cengage

5.0
Mar 28, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Total rewards, time off, great people and culture

Cons

Lots of changes and uncertainty at times

1.0
Jul 13, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The individuals below the management level are good people, with some good people at management but C-Suite is horrible.

Cons

C-Suite hides their plans under corporate speak. Cengage was a family owned private company and they sold and ever since then has had, debt, schemes to shuffle and restructure debt while implementing RIFs after RIFs after RIFs...never ending and amazingly has been in increased this last year. From their actions it's outsource as much as you can of company operations and squeeze value from Intellectual Property. Look how many times they've renamed themselves. They had a CTO join for about a month or two until she realized it was a role with no team, no authority and left. The CEO is amazing at spin, you hear "great, great, great" corporate speak as the reality on the ground is "this failed, that failed..what!? they're gone!...what they moved that department offshore!...what!? that department is now a vendor relationship...oh we're not DEI focused because the wind changed". The trend is contraction not expansion, no ground breaking innovation. My jaded view from college on expensive books has only grew since I see how the sausage is made.

6
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