Thread regarding Cengage layoffs

@654 Salesforce and ERP are a complete disaster. Full Stop.

@ag umm, Cengage needs to cut some of the arrogance in leadership and those leading the Salesforce fiasco.

Full Freaking Stop.

"It's very suspicious."

Oh heck, Cengage has been doing this for years. Sort the reviews by most recent and you will notice a very definite pattern, lol.

@3z6

Yes, I noticed that too. After a slew of bad, detailed reviews, there are a bunch of 4/5 star reviews that say nothing substantial. It's very suspicious.

I am seeing a lot of BS posts on Glassdoor reviews released within the last week.

You know what they say - better to be paid than laid off…. Too soon?

@20j it’s Monday! Back on the clock! Time for the paid troll to chime in!

@1m7 probably the one you wrote and then chose to repost on here to try and validate some point. More fake news and yelling into the wind. Good luck with this and the 10 people that visit this site.

Another accurate, very detailed review just posted:

Since Apollo Capital's $500m investment several years ago, there has been consistent pressure to cut costs by swapping seasoned professionals for offshore contractors. Leadership continues to spout propaganda about the product's quality being the same, which isn't believable to those in the know.

As employee morale plummets (25% engagement drop over 3 years), leadership repeatedly mouths platitudes about getting better at managing change and this all being in service of making the company operate with 'simplicity'. Leadership waves giant reorgs into existence, eliminates hundreds of roles without a clear, detailed plan for how things are going to look after.

Advice to Management

1. Manage the company that you have, not the company that you want. Moving to a P-M model sounds great in theory but you can't just hand-wave that into existence overnight. You have a conglomerate of different business unit types, technologies and team organizations that can't be shoved together and told to "figure it out". If you want to change operating models, try creating a roadmap and actually asking the people who do the work for their input.

2. Stop outsourcing all your institutional knowledge. With all due respect to the offshore contractors, being permanently embedded in a business context generates hard to quantify but real value. Some business units are held together by the deep professional relationships and institutional knowledge of it's veteran employees. Cengage has become dangerously dependent on contractors and is on a trajectory to become even more so.

3. Stop pretending that the actions of the last few years are good for the Cengage business long term, rather than good for Apollo's exit in the next 2 years. That's the reality and you should just own it. A strategy that cared for the long term health of Cengage wouldn't eviscerate the internal capabilities of the most impactful teams.

4. The comms strategy for this round of 150+ layoffs felt abysmal as you tried to keep announcements to as narrow a group as possible. In my case, there was no announcement of the multiple eliminations on my team. Not to the teams we worked closest with, not in any announcement emails. Some of them found out when I sent my farewell email the next week.

All you are doing by being so close lipped about this is creating a back-channel employee rumor network, which I assume is the opposite of what you want. It made it more difficult to hand-off work in a timely manner, not that there was any real plan for who was going to do the work.

@jw+1jvschek4

An educational sales consultant is a sales job.

It's interesting that an Educational Consultant is complaining about the sales they get.

The May 08 one seems super suspicious. There's no way a Product Manager at the Mason Office would be content given that they had to say farewell to so many people.

While Apollo's investment in our company does not come from one of its hedge funds, Apollo does manage hedge funds, which could understandably cause confusion. A quick Google search brings up hedge fund references. That said, I find the overly positive Glassdoor reviews, ones that just say “Great company!” with no details, far more suspicious. I don’t personally know anyone at Cengage who’s genuinely happy right now. Who’s writing those glowing reviews?

"the latest batch were written by the same person"

I had a look and you're right. Multiple reviews crying that the "hedge fund" owners don't care a wh-t about education.

P.S. to Einstein: Private equity and hedge funds are two vastly different things, lol.

Yeah no, the latest batch were written by the same person. I am certainly no Cengage fan but if one is going to post multiple fake reviews, at least have the brains to change up the language you use from post to post lol.

Private equity must have cut its "Glassdoor Influencer" budget.

Wow, the recent reviews are surprisingly accurate. I haven't seen them before.

Greetings,

Employee engagement is something Cengage highly values. According to Glassdoor, where Cengage was named a best place to work multiple times, there is "Too much of middle management."

The Leadership Team is looking to resolve this issue.

Full Stop!