駿湧廣告有限公司

No advantages

I am a design intern here and am required to intern for one year. The boss said that the workload for the year should be equivalent to that of a regular employee, but the salary is half the regular salary.

The workload is extremely heavy. You are required to proofread at least 100 items a day; if you do not meet this target, you have to work overtime without pay. There was one month when I received only NT$9,000.

Most of my coworkers have an extremely bad attitude. They are extremely impatient when you ask them a question. In short, this place is simply a nightmare. Do not come here.

The interview was very simple, the colleagues were straightforward and easy to get along with, lunch breaks were right on time, you could bring your own food to heat up in the microwave, and they even played the radio for everyone at work. No experience was required, and there were plenty of opportunities to do math.

The work of an administrative assistant includes answering and screening calls, entering orders, serving customers picking up orders themselves, sorting outgoing shipments, sorting incoming deliveries, checking and tracking shipments, and being the first person everyone looks for whenever someone enters the office.

On my very first day, I was asked to work until 18:15 (although overtime was calculated starting at 18:30). After that, every day I left at nearly 30 minutes past the end of the workday, or even later (during the interview, they only mentioned that overtime might be required during busy months, periods with many holiday activities, or when work was unfinished, so I assumed it was not the norm). However, I noticed that almost everyone in the office worked overtime every day. Even a colleague who was also an administrative assistant and was very familiar with the work still worked overtime every day. If overtime is something you really mind, you should consider this carefully, because you really do end up working so late that you have no personal time. The latest I worked was past 20:30.

Also, the company does a lot of business and therefore has many customers. It is understandable if a customer who needs attention cannot be fully introduced to you all at once. However, when you have just started, know nothing, and are very unfamiliar with everything, it greatly increases the time needed to complete tasks if no one is regularly nearby to supervise or guide you. Often, after I had finally finished handling something and showed it to them, or when someone suddenly came over, they would tell me that an item did not need to be entered into the account, or that it had to be given directly to someone. I could only blame myself for being so unlucky and unfamiliar with the work.

The company works at a very fast pace, and the training is also very fast. After briefly explaining something, they would leave you to handle it alone. Otherwise, they would explain a huge amount all at once. I would say that I wanted to take some notes, but as soon as they saw that I had nearly finished writing, they would continue rattling things off. When I genuinely did not understand and wanted to confirm something, they would say, “Didn’t we already explain that last time?”

Then, as soon as they taught you each new task, they would immediately leave the new employee to handle it alone. The other administrative assistant was often running back and forth, so it was frequently difficult to find anyone to ask. When I tried to handle things slowly and step by step, they would come over and say that my desk was messy and that I needed to learn how to categorize things (because I was genuinely unfamiliar with the tasks, while the workload was also quite heavy). After I roughly understood how to categorize things, they would tell me that I also needed to know how to prioritize the work, because on a given day I not only had to handle that day’s tasks but also enter the next day’s orders in advance.

Overall, this may also have been a problem on my part, so the company cannot be entirely blamed. If you are not familiar with advertising production materials, the job can be very difficult. In addition, some salespeople do not enter their quotations into the system beforehand, so there are already many things to handle, and you still have to go ask the sales staff. Sometimes the graphic designers accidentally make typos, and because I was unfamiliar with the work, I would enter the orders according to the forms. Only after a large amount had been produced would I discover that something had been entered incorrectly. Therefore, if you are genuinely interested in or have some knowledge of the advertising industry, and also want to become a salesperson, I highly recommend starting as an administrative assistant.