Typical Challenges

The Managing Director has also required a summary of the important points mentioned and you weren’t able to take notes during the meeting because the projector gave in and you had to sort out the tea for everyone – so what to do? Maybe transcribing the audio yourself when you are already working a 10 hour day in order to make that deadline? With no experience of transcribing, you realise to transcribe the audio might actually be harder than expected. You had difficulty understanding the Marketing Executive from Wales and the HR Manager from France seemed to mumble somewhat. Fabio from the Creative Team in Italy also spoke slightly faster than expected and thought it would be okay to reference Italian terms and intermix them with English, so you weren’t always understanding what the gist of his points was. The MD calls you a second time asking for the notes as he would like to forward them to the Sales Department and just can’t understand why it is taking you so long to provide the notes as the meeting was only one hour-long. He ends the discussion by demanding that he would now like you to transcribe the entire audio and get it back to him by tomorrow afternoon (that way nothing will be missed, you see). A colleague then mentions that, to her knowledge, her former flatmate who used to transcribe on the side would take about an hour to transcribe 5 minutes alone!