Big corporate publisher living in a mean little bubble. - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

2.0
Aug 16, 2013
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

With hard work and passion for education, I was able to move up swiftly.

Cons

It's funny that I just received my letter about Cengage's bankruptcy today...I've been thinking lately how different my life is now working for a company with a culture of accountability, kindness and recognition of true achievement. My memories of Cengage generally center around the mean clique of middle to upper managers who had been with the company for years and years and had no discernible worry about performance or innovation. Years of observing superiors taking advantage of the company's flexible work policies, abuse of expense accounts, rewarding cronies for strategies that yielded no results and taking advantage of the lower-level, hard working employees is what I remember first. But in the wake of the bankruptcy, I see all of this in context: editors and marketing directors truly felt that they knew everything and didn't need to do any market research, review their competitor's technology or content or put in the effort to innovate. They knew that they could not be fired that within the crony culture of the company, it was not necessary to perform, work too hard or meet any particular goal. Nothing changed, nothing was fixed, students interests were not a priority.

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5.0
Mar 28, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

Total rewards, time off, great people and culture

Cons

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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.

3
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