Part 1

Samantha: Graduation. What a day! Your life is about to begin! And then your parents say…

Mother: Get a job.

Samantha: I tell you! Looking for your first job out of college can be pretty hard. Reading all the job listings [lists of jobs and vacant positionsin the newspapers or journals招聘启事] is so annoying. Even trying to figure out what the actual job is can be difficult. Searching through the want ads [招聘广告] can be so boring. And writing your resume is really hard work.

Samantha: I don’t have that day open. [I am not free that day]

Samantha: Getting a job interview, and then going on it– the whole process is pretty tough.

Interviewer: Sorry to keep you waiting. Uh, have a seat. I have your resume here, and you’re interested in the assistant’s position.

Samantha: Yeah. Yeah, I am.

Interviewer: Well, the right candidate for this job has to be very outgoing and sociable. After all, it is a sales position.

Samantha: Well, I’m a real extrovert. [outgoing性格外向] Definitely.

Interviewer: And the right candidate has to have great self-confidence. Customers need to fell that you know what you’re talking about.

Samantha: Well, I’m really self-confident. Um, I know what I’m talking about and I think I can project that.

Interviewer: So, what skills would you bring to this job?

Samantha: Well, I realize that I’m completely overqualified for the position. I mean, um, in my last job, I was running the whole place.

Interviewer: Oh, so you’ve supervised people?

Samantha: Yep. Five of them. So, obviously I could do this job, no problem. I also have really good computer skills. Um,what else do you want to know about me?

Interviewer: Uh …

Samantha: Even though I was trying really hard, even though I had sent out about 300 resumes, even though I asked all my friends and relatives if they knew of anything, I wasn’t getting anywhere! Despite all my best efforts, I was still unemployed.

Part 2

Mother: Please, why don’t you see a career counselor? I’ll pay for it. Anything to help you get a job!

Phyllis: Samantha, I’m Phyllis Stein. Welcome.

Samantha: Oh, hi, Phyllis. Nice to meet you.

Samantha: So. I figure, heck, why not? I met with Phyllis Stein, a professional job coach.

Phyllis: Interviewing is vital to getting the job that you want.

Samantha: She showed me how to prepare for an interview by doing research on the position and the company. And later, she coached me on my interviewing skills.

Phyllis: I am going to pretend to be your interviewer, and then we’ll stop it and replay it and look at the video and see what we could learn from that. OK?

Phyllis: I don’t think that you should go into an interview having not practiced with some of the questions that are pretty standard.

Phyllis: Tell me about yourself.

Samantha: Well, my parents – my mom is a social worker, and my dad is an engineer.

Phyllis: Your preparation is really important.

Phyllis: What do you know about our organization?

Samantha: Well, I saw on, um, the Internet that you do business publishing? Right?

Phyllis: There’s a whole range of things that have to do with how you present yourself.

Phyllis: Why should I hire you?

Samantha: Oh, well, um, I’m a really outgoing person, and I like, I like people a lot. I’m responsible and nice.

Phyllis: You need to think about what the interviewer is actually looking for.

Phyllis: Samantha, what was a major problem that you’ve encountered and how did you solve it.

Samantha: I haven’t really had any problems to deal with.

Phyllis: Thank you. Now, let’s look at your mock interview[模拟面试] on videotape.

Phyllis: I think it boils down to [归结为] preparation, presentation, and understanding what the interviewer is looking for.

Phyllis: Tell me about yourself.

Samantha: Um, well, my name is Samantha Green and, um, I grew up in Cambridge and, um, I went to Boston College.

Phyllis: Another way of answering it is not telling about yourself, but telling about yourself in relationship to the job. So, they don’t care so much about your parents and that you want to live in Cambridge. They may need you to be able to be a troubleshooter.[纠纷排解人] You use some examples in your life from being a troubleshooter.

Samantha: I haven’t really had any problems to deal with.

Phyllis: One of things that someone who is an assistant in a trade show is doing, is dealing with problems.

Phyllis: You need to be sure that you stay, sort of, on target with presenting…presenting yourself in the strongest possible way.

Part 3

Samantha: This time I felt a lot more confident when I went in for the interview.

Samantha: I have developed strong communication skills. In college I worked on the school paper, and I’ve brought some writing samples to show you. I also worked every summer at a bed-and-breakfast. [small hotel or private house that provides a room for the night and a meal the next morning] I worked a lot with our guests. I booked reservations over the phone, got them what they need, and handled any complaints.

Samantha: Well, I feel like I did really well. We’ll see.

Speaker1: Making a good first impression is the most important parts of a job interview.

Speaker2: Arriving on time and being confident are the most important parts of a job interview.

Speaker3: It’s very important that you are being confident and you’re being clear in your answers and listening carefully.

Speaker4: Not fidgeting [keep making small quick movements with parts of your body because you are bored, nervous or impatient坐立不安] and being confident are the most important things in a job interview.

Speaker5: Writing a thank-you note is the most important thing you want to do after a job interview.

Speaker6: And go in there with a firm handshake.

Listening in

Talk

Well, welcome to the first of my workshops oncompany culture. And as you’re aware, my session this morning is on “How to Get on with the Job”.

So you had a successful interview and you’ve got the job you wanted. But this is just the start of life at work. The biggest challenge of a new job is fitting into a new environment and working alongside your colleagues. You may be the perfect employee, but what happens if you work with someone who is always late, uses the Internet for personal reasons during company time, takes a lot of sick leave [病假], and makes a lot of mistakes – mistakes which you might get blamed for?

So what do you do in these circumstances? Can you raise the matter with your colleague? Maybe suggest going out for some coffee and asking what the company rules are. It might be abit tricky, especially if, as is likely, you’re very junior. Your colleague might resent you interfering in the way they get their job done. What do you dothen?

The next person to speak to is your line manager [基层管理者], your immediate boss. But that might not be easy either. You don’t want to look like you are “telling tales” about your colleague, or give the impression that you are critical of something the line manager hasn’t noticed. It may even happen that your line manager will see you as a troublemaker, as someone who doesn’tknow how to work in a team.

Your best hope is that you have someone in Human Resources who can help. It might be best to start by asking what the rules are, and then gradually explain the specific problems with your colleague. The HR person may only promise to look into the matter, but at least you have taken the right course of action. All good companies have efficient HR departments, and since they’re usually not directly involved in the work you do, they may be able to give you the best advice about how you should fit into the company culture.

But what happens if all this fails? You can do one of two things. One is that you can go with the flow, and moderate your own expectations and sense of commitment so that they match those of your colleagues and managers. This may feel wrong to you, but it’s just possible that you need to understand more about how to work in a team. The other choice is to decide this is the wrong company for you, and start job-hunting again.

1.    What is the biggest challenge of a new job?

2.    What is the best thing to do if you work with someone who doesn’t follow the company’s rules?

3.    What might happen if you take up the matter with the colleague concerned?

4.    What might you do if all your efforts fail?

Passage 1

“It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like…It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel [弄清，阐明] the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”

This is the basic idea of an intriguing book called Outliers, by the American journalist Malcolm Gladwell. The book explores the factors which contribute to people who are extremely successful in their careers, for example, the role that family, culture, and friendship play.

Gladwell examines the causes of why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, what the founder of Microsoft Bill Gates did to achieve his extraordinary success, and why the Beatles managed to redefine [to make people consider sth in a new way重新定义] the whole of popular music in the 1960s. 

Gladwell points out that the youth hockey league in Canada recruits from January the first, so that players born early in the year are bigger, stronger and better athletes than others born later in the year. And because they have this advantage at the start of their sports career, they’re given extra coaching, and so there’s a greater chance that they’ll be picked for an elite hockey team in the future.

He calls this phenomenon accumulative advantage, (is an advantage which becomes morre and more influential over time)a bit like the idea that the rich get richer and poor get poorer. Success depends on the process by which talented athletes are identified as much as it does on their own abilities. 

Another aspect which contributes to success is the 10,000 hours rule. Great success demands an enormous amount of time for practice and training. For example, the Beatles performed live [现场表演] in Hamburg, Germany more than 1,200 times over four years, much more than the 10,000 hours Gladwell claims is necessary for great success. So by the time they returned to England, they had developed their talent and sounded completely different from any other group.

In the same way, Bill Gates had thousands of hours’ worth of programming because he had access to a computer at his high school. He also became a teenager just at the right time to take advantage of the latest developments in computer technology.

All through the book, Gladwell repeats his claim that it’s not just talent or genius which determines someone’s success, but opportunity, advantage and even simple good luck.

Outliers has met with extraordinary success, matched only by Gladwell’s own career over 25 years in journalism. As a result, many critics have seen it as an autobiography, in which the writer appears to be apologizing for his own personal achievements. But the idea that you have to be born at the right moment, in the right place and in the right family, and then you have to work really hard is a thought-provoking [making people think seriously about a particular subject or issue发人深省的] way of revisiting our traditional view of genius and great achievement. It’s certainly worth reading, so long as you don’t take it too seriously.

Passage 2

Presenter: Hi, we’re talking about typical working hours in the US and in Brazil. Eric…um… you’re from the States, tell me what are the typical working hours in the States?

Eric: Er … traditionally people go to work at 9 o’clock in the morning and they finish at about 5, so sort of a 9 to 5 [朝九晚五] .

Presenter: And, and Penny I … I know you’re English but you work in Brazil, what are the hours in Brazil?

Penny: Um varies slightly, sometimes you can start um on an earlier shift, say, 8 o’clock in the morning to 5 um or 9 until 6. But in Brazil often people will work longer hours than this.

Presenter: Right, right, OK. And what kind of clothes do you wear? I mean do you, do you dress up formally or in a relaxed way?

Eric: It used to be that you would wear a jacket and a tie to work for…for men but er nowadays an open shirt is OK. You don’t necessarily have to wear a tie and sometimes on a Friday you can wear a pair of jeans to work.

Presenter: Oh right, the dress down [便装] Friday?

Eric: The dress down Friday, that’s right.

Presenter: Does that still happen?

Eric: Yes, yes sure it does.

Presenter: And how about in Brazil?

Penny: Um it’s fairly casual, quite informal, um I mean you need to look neat and tidy obviously, but you, you have your own choice really on what you would wear, there are no rules and regulations. It’s important to look smart but be comfortable.

Presenter: Right, yeah and do you have meal breaks or is that… you just fit in meals when you can or…?

Eric: Lunch, lunch is usually an hour, sometimes a little shorter if you have to do a lot of work from your desk.

Presenter: Yeah. How about Brazil?

Penny: That’s the same, about an hour.

Presenter: And, and with overtime, I mean, if you… I mean you’re obviously contracted to do a certain number of hours. What happens if you do more than the hours that you… that’s in your… that are in your contract?

Eric: I have to make a fairly, um … strict record of my hours so if I go beyond 5 o’clock on most days I put in for overtime.

Presenter: Right.

Eric: And it’s … the first hours is one hour of overtime and then there’s I think 15-minute periods after that. So I could work an hour and a quarter.

Presenter: And you’d be paid for the quarter hours?

Eric: That’s right, by the quarter hour.

Presenter: How about in Brazil?

Penny: It’s, it’s a lot looser in Brazil actually. We, we often end up doing overtime but unfortunately not paid.

Presenter: Fine. That’s hard luck [tough luck 厄运；倒霉]. And what about holidays, what about in the States? You don’t have much holidays in the States, do you?

Eric: No, when you, when you start at a company you get two weeks’ holiday or two weeks’ vacation as we say…

Presenter: Yeah

Eric: Um then it’s usually not until you’ve been at the company for about five years that they give you another week. So you get three weeks after you’ve been there for five years.

Presenter: And, and, and what about in Brazil?

Penny: Um it’s quite good actually - 30 days.

Presenter: Sounds very generous.

Penny: Yeah, I can, I can pop back to…

Presenter: Is that 30 working days or 30 days in total?

Penny: That’s 30 working days.

Presenter: Wow that’s….

Penny: Yes yeah, it’s a good deal.

Presenter: What about retirement? I know it’s a long way off there! When do you retire?

Eric: Generally speaking it’s at 65.

Presenter: And, and the same for women?

Eric: Um, it’s, I think a little sooner than that for women. Women I think 62 or 63.

Presenter: Right, good. And, and in Brazil is it similar?

Penny: Similar to the states. It’s um after 60 for women,65 for men, or um if you’ve clocked up [记录；达到] about 30 or 35 years of service then you can retire after that.

Presenter: Right. And when…do you have a pay day? When is pay day?

Eric: Um well we get paid, er, twice a month, so we get paid at the beginning of the month and then we get paid in the middle of the month at the 15th give or take.

Presenter: Yeah, and what about Brazil?

Penny: I think it all depends which company you’re working for. For the one I am working for right now I get paid twice a month but when I began, with a different company that was once a month so, it varies.

Presenter: And are there any company benefits that you have in the states? Do you have a company car or a pension？

Eric: Yeah we get a company car. We’re able to…we lease [租赁]a car in effect but it’s a company car that we get for 18 months to two years and then we, er … we can move on to another model from, from that. There is a fairly good pension scheme, that’s still working, and hospitalization as well.

Presenter: Oh that’s important.

Eric: Yeah, a health plan through work is very important.

Presenter: Right. And, and what about in Brazil?

Penny: Yeah excellent benefits like that. Well I mean it does depend on the company and the status of your, of your job. But um you might get a car, un living accommodation, um school for the children, um they’ll pay for your lunch, travel passes, um gasoline, health insurance, all sorts of benefits. Actually it’s very good.

Presenter: Sounds very good, with the holiday and all those benefits it sounds a great place to work.