"Leo" wrote in message
m...
"tuin man" wrote in message
...
"VivienB" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 17:34:45 +0100, "tuin man"
wrote:

That said, over the years I've had a few and was left wondering is
there
some special way of reading them, as in decoding.
sniped me own

I have some experience of reference letters in Canada, the UK and Germany.
Even
though this is in academic research, a thoroughly international business,
the reference letter culture has striking differences,
and it's worth getting some local guidelines for where you're going (OP
mentioned Belgium). In Germany, for example, the equivalent of a
reference
is a 'Zeugnis' (testimonial) that you give to a departing employee to pass
on to future possible employers. The transparency of this is
superficially
attractive, but the impossibility of writing anything negative (or even
positive but slightly unusual) means there is a lot of telegraphic
communication by faint or absent praise. As
a non-native speaker it's easy to accidentally write something that will
be misinterpreted. In Canada on the other hand it's customary to write
a strong reference in glowing terms that would probably sound foreign
at best to a British manager.

Leo

Thank you.

Though I had gone as far as indicting uncertainty about the requirement of
references for Belgium at all, your comment confirms what I had wondered
about with regard to international customs.

It was from those uncertainties that I had initially opted to ask for a
reference from only one customer who owns / runs an international high
street department store of Dutch origin, leading to a document which might
reflect Flemish custom whilst helpfully being in Dutch. (Last January, no
one within the job agency I went to spoke English)

It seems that not only are there international differences, but there are
also different types of reference as well. And as you point out, also
referred to as testimonials

There are specific job/work refs, general refs, and character refs.

On one of the sites I posted earlier on this thread, it pointed out that
managers want / need the easy route and so therefore it's best to tell them
what to write.

But apart from not knowing how to match unknown customs, I find the idea of
telling customers what to write really weird. Perhaps if I were dealing with
a manager I'd have no such qualms.

That said, having asked a few customers, their reply was; "tell me what to
write and I'll write it!"

Trouble with that, apart of predicting Flemish tastes, is that though I had
something in mind, I didn't feel talented enough to word it and even if I
were, humility made me reticent.



What I wanted was a bit of everything, i.e. a reference which follows the
specific strengths of a work reference, in a manner as to simultaneously
open up the potential to release me from pigeon hole limitations/
presumptions, whilst also having the flexibility of a general reference so
as not to limit job range, along with providing a character reference as
well and all within the format / code (as described within the web site) so
as to alert the potential employer of its status within that framework.

Then I thought, hmm, another client is a very successful publisher.

Without outlining my needs as specifically as I have just done above, nor
mentioning them all, to my bewilderment on how to cross-over some of those
points, he responded by saying he'd have a little think about it. It didn't
take him long at all to come up with an excellent solution.

And Boy oh boy, but I can now see why he is a successful publisher (-:



Patrick