House of Cards - Manager Cengage Employee Review

2.0
Mar 30, 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Increasing opportunity throughout my career to collaborate with various teams and to be involved in dynamic projects. Good benefits, amazing co-workers, and flexibility from my management to balance work and family life have been the best.

Cons

Company culture, morale, and working knowledge among the employee base has deteriorated over the last 2 years as teams have been realigned multiple times between the traditional text and digital development . Executives increasingly promote internal consultant-types and utilize external firms, grasping at straws to develop "strategy" and create short-term results without understanding the impact to workflows. Unfortunately, the executives have no regard and don't address the additional band-width needed by IT, accounting, etc., to support "strategic" initiatives and the increasing requirements. In fear for their own jobs, managers won't mention this to upper management and expect their teams to "step-up" and incorporate requirements into their objectives "seamlessly" without additional band-width, compensation, or system support.

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.

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