Thread regarding Cengage layoffs

@k1 confirm. It is ridiculous. They are promoting hate and division. Literally look at the ones in 'charge' they are all out to lunch mentally. Literally have never sold in their lives. Looking at them is hilarious. They are and have been doing a great job of making peopl leave. It is truly a sin to watch these people operate. Everyone cannot wait for the useless pukes from forrester to have to find new jobs. they singlehandedly can be either awarded or blamed depending on what you thing Cengage's motives are. Forrester fired loser and look at who hired them and put them in charge.

@qn there are dehumizing people on the Infosec side. most from forrest research. you know who. Deplorable tactics by deplorable people.

1 has more cats than people on her team - that are running away as fast they can from her 'personality'. her cats would bolt we are all sure of it. just a diabolical and sad human being. the evil that are in these people's bones is disgsting.

@1w5 yes. Bookstores are such an old antiquated selling model. It’s always been a scam. Back in the day when returns didn’t count against you reps would go into the stock room and damage thousands of codes so they’d have to be sent back and reordered by the bookstore. Ponzi scheme sh-t.

We are cutting backroom deals with bookstores wherever we can. But here’s the part most people outside the industry don’t understand: there are already dozens of different versions of the CUI model happening from institution to institution.

Some deals are $30 per student. Some are $40. Some are well over $100. There is no real standard. The bookstores figured this out a long time ago. That’s why they created Equitable Access (EA) and Institutional Access (IA)—essentially CUI for all publishers.

And yes, we have even done deals directly with bookstores without the institution involved. If a bookstore was naturally generating $1.5 million a year in sales, we could offer them CUI at $1.3 million just to get the contract signed.

Why? Because having another signed CUI contract helps tell the CUI growth story.

That’s where things get interesting.

Bookstores can get burned on these deals because faculty change adoptions. Students don’t always behave the way the model assumes. And all of a sudden, the projected economics don’t work. The losses can wipe out whatever gains the bookstore thought it was getting.

Investors should be paying VERY close attention to this.

There is a shell game happening around CUI contracts, and Cengage has been willing to take HUGE losses simply to get contracts signed and increase the number of institutions under contract.

Here’s the simplest way I can explain it.

Imagine you own 30,000 apartment units. You could operate them like Airbnb and potentially generate $1 billion a year, but you have to constantly work the properties, turn them over, manage them and deal with the variability.

Or you could sign long-term leases and generate $700 million a year. Less upside, but much more predictable revenue. So the owners decide they want the $700 million because Wall Street likes predictable revenue.

Then they push out the people who actually understand the real estate business and replace them with a bunch of people whose primary qualification is that their parents helped them buy their first house. LOL!

That is basically where things are with Cengage. The problem is that everyone can see the housing slump (AKA - Ai

The question investors should be asking is whether these contracts are actually creating value—or whether Cengage is simply buying predictable revenue by giving up hundreds of millions in potential revenue.

A signed contract is not necessarily a good contract. And the number of CUI contracts on a slide deck doesn't tell you what those contracts are actually worth.

That's the part of the CUI story that I think investors need to understand.

@1p6 if these publishers were smart- they’d cut out the bookstore and go straight to the school to negotiate pricing and deals. That’s exactly right- academic freedom will always prevail, CUI and any form of blanket deals from publishers will never happen and have always been dead in the water and not worth the headache.

The hard truth NK doesn’t want to confront is that CUI is not a scalable strategy for Higher Ed.
Yes, a few state systems are considering it, but the major 4‑year research universities — the institutions that actually drive volume and reputation — will never sign a single‑publisher contract. Academic freedom isn’t a buzzword; it’s a structural barrier that has ki-led every version of this strategy for more than a decade across every publisher.

CUI might land a handful of community colleges or small state schools, but those institutions are financially unstable, consolidating, or shutting down. That’s not a foundation you can build a company on.

The idea that CUI will ‘save’ Cengage ignores the reality of the market:
• faculty will not give up control of materials
• departments will not lock themselves into one publisher
• research universities will not sign exclusivity deals
• the revenue upside is tiny compared to the risk
• the institutions willing to sign are the least stable

CUI isn’t a growth strategy — it’s a desperation strategy.
And the more leadership tries to force it, the more obvious it becomes that we’re a decade behind the rest of the industry.

If NK continues betting the company on CUI, he’s betting on the one strategy that has failed every time it’s been tried. Employees can see it. Customers can see it. The market can see it.

Leadership needs to stop pretending CUI is the silver bullet. It’s not.
It’s a last‑ditch attempt to create predictable revenue for an IPO, and it will collapse the moment it hits the academic‑freedom wall

@r1 nailed it. The big hard truth NK absolutely doesn’t want to hear is that no major 4 year research university is going to sign up for CUI contracts. CCs will always be the ones interested and they are very broke, volatile group- lots are shutting down/consolidating. Publishers have tried to do this for many years, many ways. Academic freedom is always going to be at the forefront of these major universities. You will never get them to sign a deal with one publisher- professors would lose their minds. (Of course you will always have the one offs usually in remedial math courses or online) So another loser decision that won’t save the company. Cengage is literally over a decade behind. So many other avenues to actually grow.

@qb they were trying to sell Gale for entirely too much- its great content and pure profit - it wasn’t that no one wanted it. The PEs would be happy to sell it for half of what they were asking for back then, today. They missed the boat. Same with Cengage. They wanted entirely too much and it’s now a dinosaur. Dolts at the helm here.

National Geographic had approximately between 11 to 14 reps nationally. All of these roles have been eliminated on May 1st Reorg. A few of them became CSC's ( some couldn't handle technology so they either left the company or transferred into rep jobs. NGL/ELT Title and their platform called Spark was broken up. Highered Humanities reps also have to sell NGL products to Adult continuing education at 2 and 4 year schools. and K12 has to handle the NGL titles, in their markets which is normally found in the adult education K12 market.

Humanities/Social Science/Gale/ ELT (NGL)
Math/Science/Computing
Business/Healthcare/Trades

Infosec/Cengage work/Milady - Have no clue how it was spilt up but if you are reading this please share how these 3 divisions were split up or the plans they have for them.

Wow! Over 20 schools and half over night? No more company cars ..... Sounds like Reps are going to be racking up some mileage on those Cherry Red Convertibles the Leader of the Sales Team "SW" told them all to go buy... after taking away the company vehicles. I

I'm jealous that all of my colleagues went out and purchased Brand New Convertibles can truly picture them Rolling....

After crawling across campus f to freedom through five hundred yards of sh!t-smelling foulness I can't even imagine. Or maybe I just don't want to. Five hundred yards. That's the length of five football fields, just shy of half a mile
One day we will all be free : Thanks "SW" I love my new car:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/the-shawshank-redemption-1994-andy-dufresnetim-robbins--677439968970824893/

Correction…. Many field territories/Pods are more than 20 schools now, some over 30! And in some territories over half of those schools are overnights. Pods vs discipline specific “districts” are a disaster!

@r1 thank you for sharing valuable insights! I am part of the higher ed team and am completely oblivious about most of the stuff.

What’s Actually Happening Inside Cengage After the May 1 Reorg
For those outside Cengage who are posting confidently about things they don’t actually know — here’s the reality from inside the sales organization.

The May 1st Restructure: What Changed
The sales team was broken apart from a generalist model into three specialized “book bags”:

Humanities/Social Science/Gale
Math/Science/Computing
Business/Healthcare/Trades

Leadership calls this a “pod.”
In practice, it’s the same groundhog‑day restructuring cycle we’ve seen before — just with new leaders who think they’re reinventing the wheel because they came from Microsoft, Apple, or consulting backgrounds where they’ve never actually sold anything.

How Pods Work
There are 150 reps total, grouped into pods of three. Each pod also has a Strategic Account Director (SAD) — essentially a pod leader — whose job is to coordinate the three reps and craft a strategy to win over an institution’s C‑suite (provost, president, deans) and push toward a CUI contract.

Each pod is assigned 8–12 institutions, which is far too many to cover effectively. If leadership enforces the “12–15 customer visits per day” expectation — logged in Salesforce under Tasks or Log a Call — reps will be spending two nights a week in hotels just to keep up.

The Management Tangle
Each rep still reports to their discipline‑specific manager, but now also answers to the Strategic Account Director — effectively a second manager or babysitter.

The Institutional team of SADs (formerly BBDs) now has to actually learn the product portfolio. These roles pay $130K–$180K, and many of these folks now need to understand the catalog. Good luck to them — they’re in for a rude awakening. Some of the new SAD's already worked with the reps so transition is easier except they all now have territories that require extensive Travel Travel Travel. Turn the computer off and drive to campus. All of us.... I actually like this part.. BBD have been notorious for pretending to work.... Not anymore .. everyone is watching.

What Happened to Other Divisions
Milady and National Geographic Learning have been gutted. Gale is now just another piece of the Higher Ed puzzle. Most of the remaining NGL expertise comes from 3–5 legacy employees who answer questions in Slack while juggling their new roles.

Infosec’s place in the new structure is unclear — I’m still digging into that.

It’s a mess. A full‑on operational sh!t show.

Why This Is Happening
The losses are going to be massive — and leadership knows it.
They don’t care.

This restructure is about making Cengage look clean and simple for an IPO:

One Higher Ed division
One K12 division
Everything folded under “Cengage”

Apollo wants to offload this dying company onto the public markets and extract whatever value they can from investors. Once you accept that, everything happening around you makes sense.

The Hard Truth
Customer support is at an all‑time low.
Sales talent has been pushed out over the years.
CUI contracts are the only strategy left to stabilize revenue.

In the past, Cengage grew because it hired strong reps.
But leadership decisions slowly hollowed out that talent — and now they’re scrambling to rebuild a sales engine with fewer people, more territory, and more complexity.

We’re all trying to understand this new structure — including me. It’s confusing, chaotic, and clearly designed for optics, not performance.

Infosec was absorbed and loads of folks laid off several years ago. So I think at this point may be only the brand?

And I thought gale was being folded in or at least minorly connected to NatGeo. I know they want everything to fit into the higher ed format but the sales are different at school level. They only care about school during adoption cycles every three or so years when millions are raked in. And get put out when offyears earn less money. As designed.

They were trying to sell off Gale 15 years ago. Nobody wants it. EBSCO is the only logical suitor and they don't seem interested in taking on a publishing arm.

@kx humanities reps will never be able to sell the ELT or Gale product lines at the scale they’ve been sold at prior to this takeover. Whoever made that decision should be fired. Also seems they were not truthful in their Q1 earnings call as they don’t even have reporting on how those lines of businesses are doing- they kept their remarks very vague “doing how they did last year” and that’s just not true.

@kx the post said they are trying to sell infosec- I was saying I’m shocked they a aren’t trying to sell off ELT and Gale. Learn how to read and interpret.

@kx - I am not familiar with the sales side. In higher ed, these role transitions occurred: portfolio manager -> editorial manager; portfolio assistant -> editorial and learning associate; learning designer -> learning manager.
On the Gale and ELT side, I am not seeing any change in the names of these roles. They still have portfolio managers, academic designers, content developers, and learning designers. This makes me think more restructuring will happen to those areas to make the departments more "aligned" with Higher Ed. But I could be wrong.

You obviously do no work at cengage. ELT and Gale have already been absorbed into Higher Ed titles and positions. All of the Gale reps and ELT reps were let go in the Reorg or placed into positions such as the CSC or as reps.

What they did with all of there Internal teams, product, marketing etc... I have no clue but the sales managers were also placed into positions in Higher ed.

@k9 They will. Some individuals in those areas still have old titles. Look at the titles in Higher Ed. Additional restructuring will happen to ELT and Gale.

@k1 shocked they aren’t doing this for ELT and Gale too.

@bw they’re actively trying to offload Infosec. Once that’s done they will have some cash and possibly offset layoffs for the rest.

@fz Ha! Have they ley you our of time out. You can post again? LOL! Why didn't you start your post with BRUH? every time some says IPO, there you are to deflect the fact that the IPO is happening. Cengaeg is wasting money on you and the social media team, maybe your department will be cut soon. Your deflections are not working and the cengage social media team has allowed glass door ratings to fall to an all time low. You will most likely be terminated for poor performance... no severance for the social media team. Oh! How do you like that Bruh?!!?

Shareholders won’t like losses either, and I think rounds of layoffs may even increase to quarterly.

"This is there Exit and there is nothing that is going to stop it."

It is amazing that anyone with language skills this poor ever authored an email on behalf of a college publishing house.

There are lots and lots of factors that can halt an intended IPO, and most of these are beyond Apollo's control. PE firms are sitting on a combined 33,000 zombie companies such as this one, market conditions prevent a successful IPO launch and they are stuck. NYT pubbed a detailed piece on this very thing a few days ago, it's worth looking up.

@ab they definitely severely underestimated the losses they calculated. Everyone is looking for another job.

@bw Apollo has not and will not give up on the IPO. The other 3 Private Equities have signed off on the IPO and there is No way Apollo would risk having to start over. The other PE's agreed to the IPO not the selling of it into pieces. Its hard enough to get 4 faculty in a room to choose 1 book, now imagine getting 4 PE"s in a room all of whom have billions under assets to agree to anything. Apollo PE team are extremely aggressive and have been described as AS*holes. This is there Exit and there is nothing that is going to stop it.

If Apollo has given up on the IPO there will definitely be more layoffs. The only way they make their money back is an IPO or chopping up Cengage and selling it off.

Feels like our internal messes (processes, policies, data, knowledge, ownership) and lack of industry / commercial knowledge by new leadership has us at a competitive disadvantage for years now. To have a flat growth year would be a miracle. I’m not counting on a bonus but hoping to avoid a layoff.

The new SVP of Product and Content Operations, GB, seems pretty ruthless. She's new, too.

"My manager said their will not be a reorg or a group layoff in the 2nd Half, so the next 7 months the majority are safe."

Hehe, this sounds like the old "Cirie will save us!" mantra we used to see on these boards. We all know how that turned out . . .

The social media Hack, that likes to start their posts with Bruh must have gotten flagged. their post was removed, so now they are down voting the other posts on here. LOL what happened bruh?

No More mass layoffs this year. and the Me too situation is close to the end. Only a few people are left that know the story, but you are reading this so you now know the story. Maybe you will be added to the Comings and Goings List for knowing the story:

HR - VP MM terminated and was not a hack. She was well liked and worked at this company for more than 20 years. The new lying leaders wanted her to fall in line, but she didn't.

Facts:
SVP/General Manager - "ER" terminated for orchestrating a me too cover up
Chief People Officer and former VP of HR - "JH" terminated for complicity in cover up
Central VP "JM" - accused of the me too event
VP of K12 "DM" terminated and was a pawn and has no clue what happened
VP of K-12 and former VP of Higher ED "WM" - terminated but was a clueless pawn
Sr. District Mgr in Central Division "DM" terminated for stupidity and using meetings for playtime.
President of K12 "ML" complicit and saw writing on the wall but ran before termination.
Countless reps terminated for only talking about what they heard about the Me Too situation.

My manager said their will not be a reorg or a group layoff in the 2nd Half, so the next 7 months the majority are safe. But there will be terminations and exits that align with normal everyday business decisions. Management has calculated in losses from the reorg and the new alignment. The issue is new wins were at an all time low so they are bracing for the upcoming results.

McGraw-Hill, Pearson, MacMillan, and even TopHat are projecting strong sells and Big Takeaways from Cengage. This is the unknown piece , how much of our existing business was actually lost to competitors. The CSC team have been working intensely , to clean up the adoptions in salesforce. Its not looking good!

There will always be more layoffs. That's what Cengage does. Another round is always around the corner. At this point, it shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone.

ET doesn’t even know how many millions they’ve lost with this set up because they can’t pull a single reliable report. They are going on “vibes” of “steady and stable”. But the reps know how many millions have walked out the door. More layoffs to come. Esp if you’re company was absorbed by Cengage HEd.