hey guys

i just want to pass on my experience about this place. I work here for my entire contract from july to july, i started just before the olympics last year. I was working in shanghai but i decided to move to chengdu. Anyway i signed my contract with them, which was 7200/mth including 1200 living allowance. they expect you to do a 40 hour week, 25 teaching hours. then you were on call whenever they needed you to do the sales peoples jobs for them.

When i got to chengdu I had to pay for my visa which was 800 for the year, the hr woman made a mistake on the application form meaning that i had to pay 800 instead of 400 because she filled in the form incorrectly. They said that they would refund the fee at the end of the contract. So when i finished my contract they did refund the money but only 400.

When i started my first 2 months salary were late. The first month an email was sent to us explaining that the company stamp was broken and they had to wait until a new one was made before we got paid WTF. It took almost a week. Not a good start. Then during the second month i had done a lot of overtime which was only paid at 100/hour. The hr dept "forgot" to add this onto my salary. i finally got it 3 weeks later after i threatened not to do anymore overtime work.

Over the rest of the year the salary was late a few times. Other problems included split shifts, five back to back classes. we would hold a meeting once a month when they would inform us of another daft idea for a class. a lot of these training schools seem to borrow each others ideas.

I have to say though i did enjoy working with the chinese staff, except the DOS, she was a real B++ch. Then our centre director was given a promotion and was replaced by this little 24 year old prick who was the top course consultant. This guy would often threaten the other chinese staff that they were easily replaceable during meetings. He tried it with us foreign teachers one day so we all handed in our notice and then we had a big meeting with him and hr where they told us that it had been a misunderstanding and that his english was poor

the hr woman was totally untrustworthy, if you decide to work for these people in chengdu be wary of this woman she tells lies for fun. At the end of my contract i moved to work in a university in the city. When my new company was processing my visa i got a phone call from our legal department who told me that the PSB hadnt received my foreign expert cert back from NDI and they wouldnt issue my a new one until they received the old one. So i contacted the hr woman who informed me that SHE had returned it, when i told her that the PSB had been in contact she told me she had given it to another staff member to return. this was 1 day before my visa expired. Luckly my new school got it sorted.

Overall NDI is a typical training school, terrible contract, no airfare, terrible holidays, 3 days for national day, spring festival, 1 day for may holiday. They gave the most basic holidays which were legal. untrustworthy hr dept, overworked, underpaid and very high staff turnover (both foreign and chinese). Im not saying dont work for them, i do advise looking around and exploring every possible option before even considering the possibility of even glancing at their adverts.

bye bye