Bittersweet end - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

Thank you for your thoughts and for the time you spent here. I encourage you to remain in touch with former colleagues – we often “meet again” when opportunities arise. I would like to add context around the decisions you describe. Importantly, customer needs drive the changes inside the organization. With MindTap’s percentage user growth year-over-year outpacing the likes of Facebook and Netflix in their early years, internal services and support must scale just as quickly. The outside firm’s support for a portion of our internal services reflects our adaptation to that need. The change has also allowed us to broaden skill sets and improve systems (as you note) while we continue our digital transformation. Implementation continues, and we must seek continuous improvement. That is one of the operational changes we needed to make to transform the company. We are also now treating disciplines in more differentiated ways. Team meetings were considered carefully in light of this backdrop. Whether to hold a meeting or not is ultimately the decision of the team’s leaders. For example, in the case of “Kiawah” (held elsewhere), the team decided that the product development and innovation training that our employees receive there is important enough to still warrant a gathering. A different meeting that was planned for Miami – counterintuitively more cost-effective than travel to our offices for the intended group – was in fact cancelled, pending further review. There is no single “silver bullet.” Keeping ahead of a changing market is a challenge in any industry. We will meet the challenge.