editorial assistant

publisher

enrollment specialist

senior manager

product manager

Wiley

Wiley skates by on its reputation as a publisher. Please don't let that reputation lure you into applying for a job as an instructional designer. 

The interviewing process alone should be a major red flag. Once you apply, there will be a minimum of 4-5 online interviews with different groups within the company before you are offered a position. It doesn't seem like management is capable of making a hiring decision without input from the cleaning company. The questions are repetitive in nature and not necessarily related to the nature of remote work. 

If you do accept an offer from Wiley, be prepared to learn their processes completely on your own. They will make various documents available to you but there is no on-boarding process. You may be a great instructional designer but what they don't tell you is a lot. 

You will be paired up with a university or two to develop new courses or revise existing content. The background information about any institution provided is minimal. You are basically walking into any relationship with new partners almost blind. The current staff may know a lot about the potential issues or problems but anyone new is on their own. 

You also do not know how many faculty members are completely new to developing online content when you receive assignments. If the university partner is new, you may be working with several novice faculty developers at the same time. This would be fine if Wiley did not have a very limited scope of hours allocated to each course development. There is no allowance for working with novice faculty developers who require extensive support. You will be blamed for their deficiencies and expected to produce miracles with those not capable of completing the work within the allowed hours.

The documentation of your work is also repetitive and extensive in nature. It may take a number of weeks or months to get set up in Wiley's systems so you may be asked to learn new documentation requests three months after being hired. For whatever small piece of work you complete, it may need to be documented in 4-5 different places to satisfy Wiley's reporting needs.

Joining an existing team is also disheartening. There is no sense of joining a team. The current staff has no interest learning anything about you. They are cold and almost scared. You quickly pick up on the sense this is not an enjoyable job and that everyone is frightened about getting fired. 

If you have any interest in producing creative content for a course, there is no opportunity to do those kinds of projects. There is a cookie cutter format for the development of every course and nothing you do involves producing high quality videos, audios or anything interesting. You basically stuff content of dubious quality into a bland Moodle format that is sold as quality to unknowing university partners. 

If you're thinking it'd be a nice job, think again. This is a call center. You wear a headset ALL day. You sit ALL day. Management is EXTREMELY strict about when you get a break. Despite being salary, management is strict about what time you arrive and what time you leave. If you're done with your work, you just sit there and have to call back status leads...people that will either answer and cuss you out, or hang up on you.

If you value your mental health and general well being, please do not work here. Yes, you have weekends off. Yes, you get a decent pay (~$17/18 an hour), yes you have paid holidays and PTO... BUT you will leave feeling defeated every day. Plus, Enrollment Counselors are required to work two 2nd shifts every week! That is 11:30am-8pm. 

If you have kids, just forget being able to pick them up on time because you literally are not allowed to leave before 5:30. Factor in the walk to your car and the downtown traffic and you're lucky if you get home at 6pm on your 1st shift days.

Additionally, if you put in your notice and respectfully leave the company (as I did), your old managers refuse to give references for when you're seeking new employment. They've also messed up my taxes so even though my income for 2019 was roughly $10k, I still owe money because they decided to send me two W2s. 

The best part about working here was being able to complain with co-workers about how terrible it is.

Wiley is pushing to be a leading publisher in technology and innovation. However, their staff is struggling by a lack of exposure and training on new material. It is clear that work-life balance is valued and they do offer generous PTO plans, based on grade level and years of experience. Over the years how much time off is available and to whom it is available, has become more challenging to locate. This raises transparency concerns by employees. 

Incentive plans and number of required hours have shifted over the course of individuals' contracts without prior approval or forced consent. The constant restructuring has led to a lack of commitment from the highest levels of management. Those who are willing to push themselves, show up on time, or dedicate longer hours or produce a greater amount of completed work, are often not rewarded beyond a momentary bonus with small incentive. The lack of advancement in a company oversaturated with under qualified managers or mangers lacking in commitment, stagnates growth for others.

Do you enjoy crying and having full-on panic attacks every Sunday because you know you have to face society partners who bully you the next day? Do you love getting absolutely no support from management to fix this behavior? Then Wiley might be for you! 

My point-of-contact at my society partner stonewalled me on a regular basis, refused to communicate with me, triangulated all communication to my higher-ups, and complained when things weren't done to her expectations. When I made efforts to meet with this person to discuss our strategy so I could better meet her demands, I was ignored. My manager paid dismissive lip service to the problem but did nothing to stop it. Instead, I was thrown under the bus for every problem. This partner contact routinely sabotaged my work so that I'd miss deadlines, even though my deliverables were complete days before the deadline, coming back with petty demands at the last minute. 

Most people at Wiley are kind, bright, and ambitious, but society partners are valued over Wiley employees. 

The training was amazing and I had such high hopes for this job. The people seemed amazing, their Online Learners Advising Model aligned so much with my beliefs. Then, they dropped me into my partner school as the sole advisor for over 536 students that needed personalized course recommendations (which I’d never been trained on). When I asked for help, I got penalized with more work. I got different answers to the same question depending on which of my superiors I asked; the top-level AD’s answers seemed to go against the very OLAM practices they promoted. When I tried to support my students, I was penalized. When I asked for help, I was penalized. I loved working with my students and the actual advising, but I felt abused by the people whose job it was to support me. I quit feeling utterly demoralized, defeated, and like another cog in their wheel. 

I worked as a consultant here for nearly 2 years. Easy place to work. It's got all of the upside of working for a publisher and academically oriented industry., It's also got the downside of being a huge multinational corporation.
I was hired to help with a project called WileyPLUS  v5. Was a major upgrade of their flagship content management system WileyPLUS 4.  The upper management seemed oblivious to the fact that the software, which was being coded offshore was not functioning.They pushed it out to their customers and it failed catastrophically. So it was one of those situations where everyone know there was a problem but no one was saying anything. No one had the guts to tell the people making the decisions that project that they set up was not going to work and they proceeded as if it was going to work. I couldn't believe my ears when they said they were going to deploy it.

I enjoyed my time with John Wiley & Sons and this was a very early part of my career which now spans over two decades.  I was recruited to John Wiley & Sons after two successful years at a competitor and relocated to a new city with a new opportunity and challenge.  At Wiley I was fortunate to meet many intelligent and hard working people many of whom are still in contact today, twenty years later.  I would recommend working at Wiley for a new graduate of university/college and you will find challenging work with opportunities for travel and career advancement.  Income within the publishing industry can be somewhat limited so you would want to be on the lookout for opportunities that could pass you by if you are not keeping your ear to the ground.  I would recommend giving John Wiley & Sons a try.

A typical day at work involved either being stupidly busy, overloaded, stressed out and strained, or so quiet, I would be sitting at my desk scratching around for things to do.

I have learnt I never want to work for a global organisation again, or an organisation with a 'corporate' attitude.

Direct management were lazy, work shy and moraless. Complete lack of drive, ability or any kind of work ethic. Senior management struggled to make any kind of decisions, don't know which direction the company should move in, and it seems to be a culture of who you know not what you know.

I could count on two hands the number of people I work with who I would stay in touch with on leaving the company. The rest are all brainwashed in to believing the world revolves around money and that, unfortunately is what drives them. 

The hardest part of my job was going in every day to contribute nothing. Its soul destroying and demotivating.



I worked as a Student Advisor. You manage outreach to students through email, call, and text. There are other responsibilities, but that's the main one. There's a workflow that dictates the daily/weekly schedule, so the work can get pretty tedious. You kind of do the same thing every term. This is both good and bad - you always know what to expect, but it can get boring. 

Most of the people I've worked with there are really great. I've heard some managers can really micro manage, but that wasn't my experience. I've also heard that the job has gotten more stressful since I moved on to another position - I don't know the details but maybe more responsibility involved or more students assigned to each SA. I actually liked my job there pretty well. 

Company is hybrid/remote, depending on where you live. PTO policy is great and benefits are pretty good. Also very good company culture, but I've struggled with the work-life balance at times.

I worked with this executive whose work life consisted of working oftentimes offsite (heavy travel and home base in England).   My daily work life would extend beyond the normal working hours.  Heavy calendar and travel management.  Flexibility and ability to reach out to other senior managers to achieve proper and correct results was frequent.   The time management to prepare quarterly reports for CEO was a group effort.   I worked with the VP of Finance closely and he became my default manager when my manager was unavailable.   The most challenging part of this position was working with close time constraints.   The most enjoyable aspect of this position enabled me to push myself harder in anticipating the needs of my manager when he wasn't available to me.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Editorial assistant 4 salaries reported	$36,250 per year
Publisher 4 salaries reported	$73,200 per year
Enrollment specialist 4 salaries reported	$39,625 per year
Senior manager 4 salaries reported	$113,125 per year
Product manager 4 salaries reported	$108,625 per year

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