Industry and company in a slow death spiral - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

1.0
26 Feb 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Nice people. Good work-life balance.They have tried to make it a more enjoyable place to work with fun events like a holiday party and summer picnic. Good cafe in the building.

Cons

The library industry is slowly dying. While all of the Big 3 library vendors have their troubles, Gale is by far the worst off with poorly performing products and a shrinking market share. Add to that the fact that most libraries are cutting their budgets every year and you have a very unstable company with little chance to grow or even become stable again. As an employee, you can expect to face massive layoffs every year to make up for the revenue lost. I have had to say goodbye to high performing colleagues each year whose jobs were eliminated for no reason other than they had larger salaries than most. Those who do survive the layoffs have very little chance for advancement. The only way to advance is to try and politic for the vacancy left by the latest senior leader who was fired as a scapegoat to the senior leaders at Cengage. The rest of the employees are left to scramble for merit increases so low that employees' salaries are shrinking every year due to inflation. While the company won't be going away anytime soon, you can count on it shrinking each year as libraries become more irrelevant and management keeps cutting overhead to maintain profitability.

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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