Great potential, challenging culture. - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

2.0
Jan 4, 2013
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Cengage Learning has some great people and market leading products in its portfolio. In many teams, people and their experience are valued, and innovation is allowed to flourish. The company has a great attitude towards charitable giving through a wide variety of campaigns and projects, which makes employees feel good about giving back to the likes of Teach for America, It Gets Better videos for LBGT community, Everybody Wins Power Lunch reading mentor program and more.

Cons

Currently, Cengage is owned by Apax Capital Investments, and my experience at CL was that there is a huge disconnect about the changing reality of higher education, pricing, and urgency to change the way publishers deliver content in the face of open source content, new technology, and a number of new players on the tech scene. Many managers have been promoted with little to no experience actually managing products or people, and the result is a lack of cohesive overall strategy. This lack of consistency can pit cross functional teams at odds with the goals of other groups. Additionally, the heavily leveraged financial situation that Cengage faces is troubling for stability and confidence that they are willing to invest what it takes to deliver tomorrow's solutions for their rapidly changing markets.

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5.0
Mar 28, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Total rewards, time off, great people and culture

Cons

Lots of changes and uncertainty at times

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.

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