A joke of a company - Content Developer Cengage Employee Review

2.0
Jul 24, 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.

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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

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.

5
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