Great HR team, benefits, and personnel. Poor management and terrible transparency. - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

3.0
Mar 28, 2010
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Cengage has an amazing HR department. They are responsive and really try and help employees even in difficult situations. The benefits are highly competitive with similar organizations and they do an excellent job with dealing with highly distributed teams and remote employees.

Cons

Goals, strategies, and results are very poorly communicated. Yearly financial objectives seem to be based more on wishful thinking than anything in reality. Even when objectives are met, bonuses and incentives are small and no in line with the performance indicators they are stated to be upon. I have also personally witnessed multiple high-level managements decisions which were made for either political or personal gain and resulted in disastrous consequences for the departments involved and the financial bottom line.

Explore other reviews about Cengage

3.0
Jun 4, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Company has some interesting approaches to the market and in the past they seemed value employees. There are some good employees there and there was, in the past, visionary leadership, but the people with the vision and leadership skills left the company a few years ago.

Cons

The company actively de-values employees. They had a project they called "Project Horizon" where they told all employees they needed to cut costs, so the company was going to have multiple layoffs over 3-5 years - but nobody was allowed to know when, where, or why - - just one day large swaths of people would be gone. That hung over everyone's heads - for years, and is indicative of how Cengage values employees - it doesn't. Everything is about trying to secure new funding and prepare for an IPO, so they stopped investing significantly in the products about 3 years ago and that's about when they stopped acting like they cared about employee wellness as well.

9
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