More than 5,000 people participated in an examination held by the Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA) yesterday to recruit new service personnel.
The examinees were competing for a total of 265 openings for sales clerks, technicians and maintenance workers.
Yesterday's test was specifically designed for entry-level workers and was the first held for this category of workers since 2005.
The administration received applications from 6,620 participants, though only 76 percent of them showed up for the test.
While the administration only has 81 job openings for sales clerks, more than 4,500 people applied to take the qualification test in this category.
Meanwhile, around 270 people applied for 13 technician job openings and around 1,500 applied for the administration's 171 maintenance openings.
On average, the administration's acceptance rate for applications is about 5 percent. The average monthly salary for the open positions is between NT$20,000 and NT$30,000.
However, the competition and the low pay of the positions did not seem to put off some highly educated applicants, who accounted for more than 60 percent of the participants, with three possessing graduate degrees.
Because of an amendment to the Employment Services Act (
The relatively stable career option of working for the nation's rail system drew applicants as disparate as 18-year-old high school graduate Yeh Ting-chun (葉盈均) and 60-year-old electrician Chiu De-hsiu (邱德修).
Applicants can be required to take either a written test or physical test, depending on the qualifications established for each position.
In the physical test designed to recruit railway maintenance workers, for example, applicants were required to be timed carrying a 40kg bag of sand and run back and forth over a distance of 25m.
The administration will make public the list of accepted candidates on Aug. 22. Those applying for positions with the administrations passenger transportation department must undergo face-to-face interviews after they pass the written test.
However, those who are accepted for jobs will be considered contractors working for the government and not official government workers, the administration said in a statement.
The test was significant event because the 120-year-old state-run corporation has a proven record of not being active in bringing in fresh faces. Last year, the Ministry of Examination held an examination to recruit 540 management-level employees for the administration, marking the first test of its kind since 1998.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching