Packt Reviews

3.6

47% would recommend to a friend

(535 total reviews)
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Dave Maclean

58% approve of CEO

60% positive business outlook

Packt has an employee rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 535 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Packt employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Media and communication industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

535 reviews
2.0
26 Jun 2015

Sparks of brilliance, ruined by managers

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Flexible work hours, can wear what you like, opportunities to learn technologies and in each individual teams there feels a great camaderie.

Cons

I don't know where to begin really. Managers that have been there 10 years that are content to watch youtube every day whilst being given important tasks such as product management and series guidelines to write and amend. Inexperienced managers that are quick to enforce rules yet bend the rules themselves. And managers that have had zero experience with the book publishing industry and don't care that the ideas that make the big money are few and far between, but instead want to get any book out, regardless of quality. The simple fact is quantity does not equal quality, particularly in this case. An obsession with getting things out first, hanging authors out to dry and insulting them on a daily basis as well as passing all blame onto Mumbai does not foster a great atmosphere nor great belief in the values set out by the company. The amount of favoritism shown from the CEO towards certain departments as well is shocking as is his blase attitude to bad figures and leadership skills. An incredibly racist person who is quick to joke about serious issues also highlights an uncomfortable atmosphere in the workplace. The pay grades are equally poor and whilst your role will undoubtedly change once every 6 months, the promise of a pay review will not happen until post secondment, and then the increase is minimal and most definitely not in like with the industry standard. Finally, managers love to meddle and change and are quick to claim work for themselves and equally quick to pass the buck on when it's going bad. A top team that has no clue what is going on and are just full of yes men who get free sandwiches each week.

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Packt Response
10y
Packt is a diverse workplace with a fundamental commitment to advancement based solely on performance and proven capabilities. We treat all allegations of illegal or unacceptable behaviour extremely seriously at Packt and have robust processes to report, investigate and act on all reported issues. We cannot comment on the anonymous allegation of racism in this review.We hope any individual who has such concerns will take them forward to our HR team. At Packt we're a tight team on an ambitious mission, living our values of commitment to performance and personal growth, learning and openness. This does not suit everyone. We respect that, and wish everyone well who leaves Packt to grow and learn elsewhere. Some of the comments in this review we can learn from; others we can only see in the context of a failure of individual fit.
3.0
23 Mar 2015

Poor salary, worse management

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

A decent enough place to start your career as a graduate, you'll learn some good skills if you manage to stick it out. There's no dress code, which is nice.

Cons

Terrible salary - pretty much anything below top team level pays awfully. The morale of the office is awful, no one really wants to be there and as such don't give it their all. There's a massive blame culture, especially in the Mumbai office, so nothing actually gets resolved it is instead sent on a spiralling stream of emails.

1.0
19 Aug 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Casual dress, flexible working hours, senior managers and owner are accessible in an open plan office, you get decent holiday entitlement. The offices are centrally located in Birmingham so near train stations and bus routes. The toilets have those Dyson hand dryers.

Cons

The lack of a clear business and editorial strategy created a huge problem across the company with targets and focus constantly changing to the point that no one really understood what the long-term plan for the business was. This resulted in poor leadership from the top down with regular bickering among senior managers as they struggled to understand what their remit was. This created a high turnover of staff and low morale, which was among the worst that I've experienced in my professional career. Poor salaries were a major issue with little opportunity for increasing. No on-the-job training was given for roles that required it, however criticism of competencies was rife. A number of us found the owner to be unstable with seemingly random sackings causing general unease among staff.

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Glassdoor has 559 Packt reviews submitted anonymously by Packt employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Packt is right for you.