Workplace reviews and discussion: 智擎數位科技股份有限公司

The space is decent, though slightly inferior to some genuine cafés, but it does give you the feeling of pretending to work at a quality company.

There is no professional team, from HR to upper management. The boss is genuinely someone who struggled because they never learned English well, but uses their own personal pain to prescribe a treatment by hiring teachers to cure themselves. That may not be helpful for all learners, as everyone should have a different learning method.

The boss is just a typical Taiwanese small- or medium-sized business owner who wants to appear unique but cannot forge their own path. They can only follow the crowd. The course materials and curriculum planning lack professional leadership; the magazine appears hollow, consisting mostly of advertisements and sponsored content. It has not truly implemented a learner-centered educational publication, which is a great shame.

The company says that CEFR is its instructional benchmark, but in practice, very few instructors can genuinely select vocabulary and texts corresponding to the language abilities specified by its standards. The teachers each do their own thing, and because the company’s management style is too authoritarian, they have no time to produce course content that is genuinely beneficial to learners.

The design, layout, and editorial staff are also among those being harmed. They are held to high standards but are not provided with the compensation they deserve or the materials and tools required for their work. The image libraries needed for the teaching materials were probably sourced through cheap, free channels as well.

I don’t know what other financial holes the tuition fees collected from students are being used to fill.

In the name of wanting to heal Taiwanese people’s pain in learning English, the reality is that the boss wants to prove themselves to former mentors and peers who looked down on them.

On the one hand, this makes people sympathize with them, but working under them is also heartbreaking.

The boss may be someone who cannot hear the truth and whose emotional management requires professional assistance, leaving them able only to listen to the flattering words of trusted people around them.

Overall, this is simply an ordinary employer who wants to paint a grand picture of an American-style management approach. I recommend directly pursuing an EMBA or genuinely exploring and understanding the essence of flat management.