Pearson Publishing & Dist Edu programs

I'm considering a possible job with Pearson Publishing in their Distance Edu program to manage and develop faculty. I've searched the forum on 'Pearson' but was wondering what the general attitude on Pearson was with regards to quality of programs and their attitude toward education in general?

 

In 1991, I signed an agreement with the Pitman division of Pearson, which had made an arrangement with Heriot-Watt University's distance MBA. At the time, Pearson's new CEO, Marjorie Scardino (charmingly described in a major Fortune profile as a former Texas rodeo queen and barrel-jumping champion) had announced that the company would become more focused . . . and soon after, they divested themselves of some of their extremely diverse ventures, including Madame Tussaud's Was Museum, Rothschild vineyards, a large china plate manufacturer, etc., to focus more on education. Over the next decade, they had many many ups and downs, buying companies like Prentice-Hall (for $400 million), Addison Wesley Longmans, a huge computer game company (which they sold at a huge loss a few years later), and our little business. They seem to still be in the 'fits and starts' mode. They formed a new education division and hired one of the highest-paid women executives in Europe (Pippa Wicks) to run it, but that only lasted a couple of years, and she was gone. They are still oddly diverse owning, I believe, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy as well as half the Economist and hundreds of other properties. And they continue to have a focus on distance education, with high hopes, and many plans, regularly changing. They had a real setback given that they had major educational offices and facilities in the World Trade Center. But they apparently continue to pay well, to reward performance and creativity, and to be accessible to employees -- Mrs. Scardino had a direct line that any employee could use to reach her. (When I used it to lament that The Economist was running lots of fake degree ads, she responded instantly, if not ideally.) And we were told that they have one of the highest 'on the job' rates in Europe. The man we worked for had been there 20+ years, which was not uncommon. (He later did leave, going to work in a similar position at Heriot-Watt itself.) So it sounds as if it could be a good career move. There aren't too many multi-billion-dollar companies with a strong interest in distance education.

 

Thanks!

Thank you for the detailed response. I'm looking at a job managing and training online faculty. It seems that Pearson has a very diverse holding, and as a classroom teacher, I'm very familiar with their textbook publishing.

I'm hesitant to move from the non-profit, public school setting to a for-profit organization.

 

It is a genuine concern. For-profit organizations sometimes (perhaps often) make decisions with the shareholders in mind, ahead of the customers, employees, or public. Pearson, for instance, bought and ran the excellent (my opinion) Open College in Manchester, England (the first, I believe, British school to get DETC accreditation), but later closed it down because it wasn't performing well enough financially.

(When Pearson bought our business, I agreed to stay on for three years as a new business scout . . . and my lawyer very wisely got a clause in the agreement that said that if they ever required me to work more than 50 miles from my home, the contract would be voided with significant penalty payments by them. Just over a year later, they decided to move the business to New York (and offered a generous allowance to me for moving), to which I said no. Where they moved it to was their facility in the World Trade Center.)