My First Job

My first job was in a Taiwanese shipping company. I worked there for about 6 and a half years. It was a clerical job and I was a total greenhorn when I started work there. Looking back, I now appreciate and understand what it means to experience a learning curve. As I improved and understood my work better, I felt a genuine sense of pride. Even now, at 36, I am on a learning curve to better understand Internet Marketing.

During my time with this company, the company rewarded my progress which contributed to my productivity for the company. I was given a promotion to the next level annually during my time there. Just imagine, I started off as a grade 3 clerk and eventually made it to executive level.

However, I realized that that was the end of the ladder for me. I mean, the only way to move further up was to either wait for someone to quit or for someone to kick the bucket. But they were already in their comfort zone with no clear intentions of moving to greener pastures and they were in rather good health at that time.

Well I could have just stayed on and just banked on the annual increment. But the problem was that the manager who trained me was transferred to another department which was rather incompetent. His staff were taking turns to take medical leave which really was a disruption to the work process. The work process was such that I had to deal and correspond with them and you can just imagine the disruptions I faced back then. What`s more, his staff were rather sloppy and regularly made mistakes. As such, it turned out that I was having problems getting them to do their part. Call me stubborn but I think that one must be disciplined & pro-active enough to be productive. I certainly did not want to be held back in my work because of someone else`s lack of professionalism. This resulted in my exposing his staff`s inadequacies and he wasn`t too happy with it. This resulted in protecting his staff and making trouble for me. I just can`t understand such a mentality.

Looking back, I can only say that he was behaving in an immature way given his senior position. But what to do, it takes all sorts of people to make the world an interesting place to live in.

My second job was with an Italian shipping company.

For those who are in the shipping industry, I was a transshipment executive.