Dear TN Director,
Firstly, I appreciate that you put a lot of effort into organising this traineeship, and also into handling the aftermath of my road accident. However, there are a few criticisms which I must voice, if only to spare future trainees the experience I have received.
Firstly, I doubt that you recognise the seriousness of not informing me of this traineeship's true content. I deeply regret not insisting more strongly on a clear, written job description before I left Australia (I believe that I only asked you 4 or 5 times). Did you really think that any AIESEC trainee, let along a 3rd year finance and international business major TN director who speaks 3 languages (2 badly) would be happy with 9 weeks of "not brain work" (as you described it to me in Japan, the day before I was due to start). Did you think my perspective of the world would be broadened by such tasks as holding the other end of the tape measure, cleaning toilets and factory grounds or working on a production line? Even if you suspected that I had such aspirations (?), would it not have been better to ask me before I came to Japan? Incidentally, in case you feel that you did inform me adequately of the nature of this traineeship, let me assure you that "there will be some physical work in this job" (your words) and "this job will comprise about 35% mindless manual labour, 50% of doing absolutely nothing and only about 15% actual brain work" (a more apt description) have vastly different meanings.
Did you not feel it necessary to inform my superiors of my interests and skills, or to stress that the AIESEC program is designed for mutual learning, not to exploit cheap migrant labour? Even if you did mention these to someone, somewhere along way, this was not sufficient. As a TN Director, it is your responsibility to ensure, by whatever means, that the traineeship is a quality learning experience. For your information, here is a basic breakdown of my time spent at Kanaflex:
5% translating
5% data analysis
2% writing/teaching about use of MS Excel
8%helping my boss praaaaactiiiiiiice hiiiiiiiiiiiis Iiiiiingurrrrrrrriiiiiiiiissssssshhhhhhhhh
1% cleaning toilets
1% cleaning factory grounds
5% cleaning Kanaflex products
5% measuring Kanaflex products
10% data entry
15% mindless manual labour (e.g. screwing and unscrewing bolts, rolling and packing pipes on a production line)
and
43% WAITING AND WATCHING ! !
I personally do not consider sweeping factory grounds or cleaning toilets to be a quality learning experience, but if you disagree, we can pursue this point further sometime.
The traineeship evaluations were also a major failure. No trainee can easily tell his Japanese superiors "this job is not appropriate for my skills, I want to do something else?, or "I am not here just to sit and watch , please give me something to do", so it is your responsibility to make sure that such communications are unnecessary (by passing on any concerns/difficulties in a SUBTLE, INDIRECT manner). Asking the trainee, without warning, directly in front of his/her superiors, "How do you find this traineeship?" would be inappropriate in a Western country, but it is sheer idiocy in Japan (especially when there are foreign language issues as well as those of face etc). Similarly, why would you even bother asking the TN reps "Have you had any problems with this trainee?" in front of the trainee? You couldn't possibly expect an honest answer!
Finally, what were you thinking organising a traineeship 2 hours and Y2150 (in transport costs) away from Kobe? How can you expect the trainee to get a satisfactory learning experience when it cost over a 10th of their weekly salary and over 4 hours just to pay a visit to the LC (not to mention expenses of eating out, inconvenience of staying at members' houses etc).
This traineeship has certainly been a learning experience for me, but in all the ways I had not intended. I hope that you have also learned something from this last three months about how not to run the AIESEC exchange program in future.
Nick