Bad Pay, Constant Layoffs in US offices, Outsourcing rampant in several departments - Content Manager Cengage Employee Review

2.0
8 Aug 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The people make the company. Great colleagues that are open to helping others. ERGs are great.

Cons

At least 3 mass layoffs in a year. Some of these layoffs have affected the same teams each time. Content Creation is being heavily outsourced and the Content Manager role has significantly changed causing little to no opportunity for growth professionally and financially. Very small raises. They will give you more work than what is within your job description, but will not reward you by increasing compensation. Changes taking place throughout the company are not helping the company create the best product. They are trying to make the most money possible with the lowest quality produced which wasn't what I signed up for when applying. No longer a remote first company.

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Cengage Response
1y
Thank you for taking the time to leave a review. I am glad to hear that you enjoyed your colleagues, and our employee resource groups positively impacted your experience.  Regarding layoffs, as we evolve our strategy to meet the needs of the education market, we routinely evaluate our approaches to ensure we are able to be competitive; that sometimes results in difficult decisions about colleagues and teams. Our company remains virtual-first, allowing individual teams to determine what format works best for them. For some groups, this means experimenting with a hybrid work model, but many remain virtual-first. We will continue to experiment across our teams to ensure effective collaboration and performance. We do recognize the need for employees to have time to reset and recharge, which is why we offer a wellness week – providing employees a full week off at the end of the year, in addition to their vacation time and two floating holidays. Regarding our approach to pay, our merit increases are also in line with the market and our HR teams continually monitor pay to make sure we remain competitive.  I wish you the best in your next endeavors, Michael Hansen, CEO 

Explore other reviews about Cengage

3.0
4 Jun 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.

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