As perceived by the company:

With the shortage of Non-Academic Scholars, the staff have to multi-task and work fast when there's a barrage of activities especially on a busy day like having events and such. Such exertion in effort could easily lead to fatigue which could lower the quality of work a worker could do.

As perceived by the trainee:

There are certain times that tasks that would require more time that could have been assigned to us earlier would be given to us in the last absolute minute or a day before the actual deadline. Such instances made us panic a little because the said tasks were not something we could not afford not to do so in such a short period we had to work and show a lot of progress and put pressure on us. Fortunately, they don’t happen all the time and when they do, they’re usually timed when we don’t really have a lot in our plate so we were able to do our best with these difficult tasks.

Also, with other trainees, it was not clear what their tasks really were or the scope and we found it suspicious that some of them were able to claim that they rendered the same amount of hours as we did when we scarcely saw them in the workplace. Although we were explained that they didn’t need to be at the work all the time to do their job, it did not feel like they exerted as much as effort as we did in the training.

Findings and Analysis

Recommendation:

I recommend having some sort of attendance sheet in the office that would be manned by someone neutral just to make sure of the number of hours a trainee has rendered for the job. It would also help our supervisor keep track of who’s supposed to be on duty during that certain day or whatnot.

Also, I strongly recommend that tasks that would require a lot of time (these tasks usually include both hardware and software tinkering) would be handed to us earlier so that we could have a better chance at delivering it more smoothly.