One Month Later: Job Update

Reading time: 2 minutes

I have been keeping a secret from you guys. I have a new job!

I’m sorry for not telling this great news to you straight away. I keep it a secret for one month because I want to write an objective point of view about this new job.

Yes, since April I have accepted a job offer in a digital security company. It was quite a rigorous process for me to secure this position, but I understand their need to hire the best person. Overall, it took me three months from sending my first e-mail to the Group Marketing Director to landing the job offer. I had to undergo two recruitment stages: a casual interview with the Marketing Director and a presentation joined by the General Manager and two other people in the Marketing team.

This time, my job title is Marketing Content Creative. My responsibility revolves around writing and digital marketing, whether it is content writing for the company’s website or their social media channels. I find this job very challenging and super fun because it fits my career goal. It’s also something I have been familiar with (read: THIS BLOG <3). Bottom line, this feels like killing two birds with one stone!

Truth to be told, I have been non-stop comparing my new employer to the old one. My current employer is a well-established company, hence I get more perks rather than working for a start-up company like my old employer. For example, in my current position, they offer paid business phone subscription and an all-new work laptop. Meanwhile, at my old workplace, it was so hard for me to ask for something from the office to enhance my productivity. For example, one time I asked for a laptop stand to my Office Manager because I had neck pain, and she explained a very exhausting process just to get that laptop stand from the company’s expenses. I ended up not asking for it anymore.

Another thing I notice from my current company is that they invest a lot in their employees. Just two weeks ago, my General Manager offered me a company-paid private Dutch course to improve my language skill, which I gladly accepted. I also heard some colleagues were sent to evening classes under the company’s expenses to boost their skills and gain new ones. My old employer? Don’t even start about paid language courses; they were super stingy in compensating their employees to work on company events.

However comfortable my new workplace is, I still struggle to level myself with my new colleagues. Since this is an established company, they have all the resources they need, no matter how expensive it is. Meanwhile, in start-ups, you still have to think about how you can find the cheapest solution for everything due to the small budget. Until now, I still feel shocked to see how big they invest in advanced marketing CMS tools to streamline the whole company brand. Even though one of my colleagues said that we are still far from our goal, I feel that our standpoint now is way better than what I have worked with before.

What else should I talk about? Oh, my new workplace is based on trust. We work 39 hours a week and we don’t have anything like attendance machine to clock in and clock out our work time, so I keep my own weekly timesheet. I also get 30 vacation days, the best commuting time (I only need to take 40 minutes to get to work, compared with 1 hour 20 minutes at my last job!), and the best coffee. One thing I miss from my old workplace is the daily lunch atmosphere. In my old workplace, we always sat together for lunch and sometimes we had lunch for more than 30 minutes. Now I usually spend my lunchtime either alone or with my team and they mostly eat bread and sandwiches, while I munch on my full-course meal.

I think that’s all I can say about my new workplace for now. For sure, this won’t be the last time you hear about it!