A textbook example of what NOT to do - Anonymous employee Pearson Employee Review

1.0
Jun 12, 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

+ Great people - almost everyone wants to be there to help support educators and make things better for students. + At one point had a great culture - managers were in your corner and trusted you, you were inspired to work hard and help others succeed + Flexible schedule, lots of work from home positions available for more than just sales people. + Had a great culture - you worked hard, and you saw the result of your efforts. Goals were aggressive and growth was expected - but nothing was ever unfair or unobtainable. You loved working with your colleagues and counterparts and actively sought to do more than just your job description.

Cons

- Constant reorganizations and major job eliminations have gutted this company. I was at the company 11 years and took part in 9 reorgs. - Completely clueless and callous executive team - constant cuts to staff and budget, yet requiring aggressive growth despite the losses. None of them have a good divest strategy so they would cut a group down to size and expect them to do their current jobs at maximum efficiency while also taking on more work. They are also surprised when those goals aren't met and when people in those reduced crews decide to leave. - Suspect hires at the mid-manager and senior level over the past few years have lead to a lot of chaos and major turnover. People with seemingly ZERO education experience expecting their teams to change the entire market place to meet their forecasting needs. Or people who were promoted from within and saw major turn over in their direct reports only to be promoted again to manage another team. - What was once a great culture of acceptance and trust turned into one of fear where you never saw any of the senior leaders unless there was an announcement of job eliminations or restructures where everyone (even VP level people) became too afraid of their own shadows to make a decision. - The company also became a place of frequent highly suspect behavior - including lewd and inappropriate behavior that sometimes was blatant and done so in front of an entire room full of other people. So many people - especially senior leaders - came in like a tornado, amassed a ton of inappropriate gossip only to be fired for "undisclosed personal reasons" a year or two later - but unfortunately, almost always after chasing away other people before they themselves were canned. -The company that once prided itself on being brave, decent and imaginative turned into a company that made eliminations to staff/ budget out of fear, treating workers or middle managers with zero respect and compassion and being too unimaginative to really do anything about it.

Explore other reviews about Pearson

5.0
Mar 11, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Easy job to have some money on the side.

Cons

Short period of time and low pay.

2
2.0
May 31, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Remote, $2300 a month for not that many hours of work.

Cons

The widespread incoherence of Pearson is irritating me to a significant degree. -the hiring committee mentioned the wrong pay rate so I spent a month worrying about money -the payroll agency shared the actual pay rate which was sustainable ($2,300 a month, my bills are $1,800, $2,100 with your fee baked in. - I procrastinated this week because I didn't know how to read the bureaucratese on the assignment - I figured out how to read the bureaucratese and went back to K. saying, I think I've developed something genuinely useful as a reference material for new employees. I had to synthesize information from 100 pages of PowerPoints into a two page document which cleared up the anxiety I had about how to start -can't believe K. and other managers worked as Classroom Teachers because the way they scatter information has no coherence. I had to peruse numerous documents in the SharePoint "cloud" folders, take notes, and develop a master reference document before I could interpret how to develop questions based on the bureaucratese. -I was never the most organized classroom teacher but my students knew what was expected of them. I put dates on assignments that were linear and in a consecutive sequence of beginning of week, midweek, end of week. If students had a test, I made a review sheet that was a consolidated 2-7 pages. I would never expect even my Honors students to consult dozens of pages in order to study. -I told K. about the reference document I developed and she met me partway: she recognizes one aspect of the process could be better done, new employees could be more adequately trained on the acronyms we use. That's like 25% of the way to completion. I had to figure out that "Administration 2" means the second half of a course AKA Economics for 5th and 7th graders, and 11E just means 11th grade Economics. But instead of the standards being sorted by subject, they are sorted by grade. Since the standards start with 5 for anything 5th grade, 7 for anything 7th grade, 11 for anything 11th grade, it would be coherent to just combine the standards into one document and organize by subject. -Some companies are smart, caring people trapped inside of bad systems. Like classroom teachers. Pearson feels like a repeat of my last company in its poor design and incoherence but less abusive. H) Pearson assigned us 11 questions in a spreadsheet. I think fewer mistakes would be made if they paid a college student Education major $15 an hour to type up our assignments with the criteria they want for each question. Our time is worth $30-$100 an hour. We are subject matter experts. But comprehending the bureaucratese drains cognitive energy. -I had anxiety about getting all 11 questions produced then K. said, oh you only turn in one question for the first week. Something they never said on the Microsoft Teams meeting we had last Wednesday for onboarding. If I received a sheet with 11 questions in the cloud and my name on it that's what I'm going to think I need to accomplish. But K. put in another email, only submit one question for a week. Email should be subordinate to the cloud, the cloud should supersede email ex. The federal government supremacy clause: federal government has greater authority than state governments. -Spent an hour trying to save the questions I developed in Abbi, only for them not to process and upload. Abbi feels clunky with technical failures of the early internet

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