Pearson Education Reviews

Pros

Great people to work with.

Cons

Hard to keep in communication with all persons involved.

Advice to Senior Management

During the short time I worked there, I can't think of any problems.

Pros

Pearson is great at helping employees balance their work and life. There is a certain degree of flexibility for family, outside volunteering activities. Bonus plan is very generous and the benefits are quite good. If you want job security - it takes years for poor performing employees to be fired - Pearson is a great place to work. Most employees have been at Pearson for their whole careers or almost their whole careers. There are opportunities in Pearson offices all over the world. The CEO, Marjorie Scardino, is an inspiration!

Cons

Managers keep their doors closed at all times and are very much 9-5 employees. Employees don't get their yearly goals until late July/early August. That is, we won't get our 2012 goals until July of 2012. There is very little positive feedback or recognition for a job well done or big wins. Generally, you don't hear feedback until there is a problem. There are very few women in director or VP positions except in human resources. There is no room for advancement within your group because managers stay in their jobs.

Advice to Senior Management

My advice is to get managers training outside of HR issues, such as mentoring, giving positive feedback, and keeping their office doors open. Create opportunities for employees to be promoted and make sure qualified women are put into leadership positions. Give us our goals earlier in the year. I've never been at a company that takes so long to create goals and then there are "surprises" in those goals which leaves employees scrambling. In short, take a close look at managers and their performance beyond the revenue numbers. Poll their direct reports about their manager's strengths and weaknesses. You will do the whole organization a favor by doing this.

Pros

In my experience, management is totally behind the "family first" concept and respects employees' ability to balance work and life without requiring time-clock punching. The company also provides lots of personal education opportunities to employees.

Cons

It's a very, very large company. Sometimes it's hard to know what's going on in related areas because of the number of people and locations invovled.

Pros

Flexible with schedule, good benefits package, and reasonably good compensation for the area. very nice people. The factor that makes the company most bearable is that 90% of your coworkers share the feeling that they're merely going through the motions in order keep collecting a cheque.

Cons

Soooo much deadweight. Very unprofessional environment. Incompetence—rather than being weeded out—is rewarded with new titles or promotions in order to shelter shortcomings. Information is slow to be shared, and is tightly guarded to the point that work suffers. It is common that personal lives are put to the wayside in order to catch up with work that could have been done—on time and on budget—had SOMEONE been manager enough to make a decision rather than try to guess the desires of senior management. Frightening that it's an education company.

Advice to Senior Management

Recognize those that do their jobs well. Weed out those who have no qualification to be doing the jobs for which they were hired, and reward those who are picking up their slack. (Even a cursory review would cut many jobs and reward many deserving employees who are doing the work.)

Pros

It's a steady job so I can't complain.

Cons

Very low pay. Competitors seem to have the edge on Pearson.

Advice to Senior Management

Too much time spent in meetings.

Pros

My management is motivational, personable, direct, respectful of my private life, and extremely experienced and qualified. I like working with them. My clients are impressed by them. I can trust them to do what is best for my territory. Good people who really, really love money and want to help me hit my numbers, get raises, and progress in my career.

The pay, including company car with gas and insurance, comprehensive benefits, solid 401k, is fantastic in this economy. Bonus structure is not enormous but is motivating.

Working with professors and campus administration is really great--Pearson is always the most respected of companies they work with, so they are more willing to make time for you.

I genuinely believe some of our education products are going to change the world. I constantly feel we are at the front of education technology.

Pearson does cool things at a national scale, like buying up hot startups. They feel surprisingly agile and forward thinking for a large company.

Cons

It's not easy to pull yourself out of bed after you found out you lost a massive sale the day before. That's a career issue though, not a Pearson one. Perhaps the biggest double edged sword is the massive size of the company. There are inherent difficulties to navigating through the levels and levels of departments when you need something. I'll say though that Im always impressed by how little of an issue this is. The massive infrastructure of employees and divisions is very well organized and everyone I deal with is exceptionally skilled and motivated.

#1 complaint is my clients say their tech support is awful when they call 800 number. So I have to be more on call to get help for them from my tech specialist who is excellent.

Advice to Senior Management

Perhaps because of the fact that we sell to professors and bookstores, not end users, we may not be prepared to have a conversation with the end user. The end user now exists in social media--they are millennials. Pearson seems to have very little social media presence. They need to decide how to relate to the new social world because more and more conversations are going to be happening about higher Ed products in social spheres--with or without Pearson's input.

Do they want to have a voice or do they want to risk playing catchup when some unforseeable PR issue goes viral and our company is being defined in social spheres by a few influential angry 19 year olds? I'd love to think that won't happen but I do believe we are in a hot button industry, some students of this generation are going to push back against our products, the pushback will occur in social media, and if we want a seat at the table we can't be running in at the last second. We have products that we can readily defend and there is no good reason Not to be courting the good will of our end users with a social media presence.

Pros

-Great advancement opportunity (I've had four promotions in five years)
-Supportive management
-Great product
-Great benefits
-Carbon neutral company
-Great bonus potential
Everyone makes sure that you have what you need from the management to support staff.

Cons

-Can be stressful.
-The pay is low, but that is standard for publishing.
-Some changes are not communicated effectively
-Not many advancement opportunities in the Columbus location once you've reached a certain level

Pros

+ many very smart and genuinely nice people - a collegial environment
+ very little turnover. People seem to really like working here.
+ most everyone really cares about the work they do
+ great support from my manager (not sure if this true for everyone, but it is for me)
+ challenging work
+ flexible work arrangements
+ yearly bonuses if things are going well
+ working to improve office environments (should be a big improvement)

Cons

- biggest issue: pay ranges are low
- most teams are understaffed
- widely distributed teams, limited face-to-face interactions with some peers
- decisions are very much top down, command and control is pretty much the norm
- current office environments can be stifling, hard to interact with others

Advice to Senior Management

Make the salary ranges more in line with the rest of the industry and the companies around us. You have some great employee, treat them well.

Pros

Fantastic group of marketing managers and other designers to work with. While the company is predominantly women, I felt a real sisterhood with some in the marketing and advertising departments, and could say some became real friends. I also felt my creative voice was heard by these people and it was a real collaboration.

Cons

As a web designer, the senior management had absolutely no idea what I did, and how long it took me to really do it, thus resulting in a horrible work/life balance due to completely restrictive deadlines. I found the senior management to be mostly women, cliquey and uncompromising. There was no growth in this role and I eventually got burnt out and had no one to assist or defend me, as I was the only one in the position.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay attention to technology. Pearson could greatly improve their technology and allow for their designers and UX teams to expand and really compete. If you fear technology, get out and let the right people come in before it's too late, and your competitors saturate the market with innovative ideas instead.

Pros

Decent benefits, Smart colleagues, working for a company that can potentially make a difference to the education of kids the world over

Cons

A company that makes it money from publishing books but wants desperately to be a technology company - yet has no idea how to achieve that. Messy internal systems, never-ending reorgs and non-existent communication make for very low morale.

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate better, give people real chances to advance.