The last two sentences are perfectly fine (the wishes for your future blabla).
What's REALLY bad is this
"His overall performance was satisfactory."
Essentially, this says you did a shit job.
"He had a pleasant and friendly demeanour and maintained good relationship with superiors, peers and colleagues."
"good" here means: just about enough in that you didn't kill anyone, but certainly not good, let alone anything beyond that.
Now I know why they refused to issue that letter... Sure you can ask for it to be rewritten, but they obviously don't think much of you. By law you're entitled to a "benevolent" reference, which effectively says that even if you're the worst employee ever, they have to issue a sort of decent letter. This regulation is a joke to begin with as it's next to impossible to issue a crappy letter even for the crappiest of all employees (and this is part of the reason people start to care less and less about these letters). I'm assuming they are well aware, given you claim they're a major corporation. So either you were indeed as bad as they say, or you think you weren't and can go back to discussing it, hoping for the best.
ok.. so as per my ORP (RAV) advisor, this letter is not very harmful as they have mentioned that I left the company on my own request. However she told me to send them a polite letter requesting to change it and see what they say. She told me that if they refuse, then we could arrange to send them a legal notice.
Anyways I am thinking of asking them to include the English translation of the following line - "Dies Zeugnis enthält keine Wortkodierungen und ist im Klartext formuliert".. which basically means that they haven't used any word encodings in the certificate.
Quite frankly, this doesn't even need coding. It's bad enough as it is.
Disagree with the RAV person in that it is not harmful if you use it for some (Swiss) company that cares about these references. I would never use that letter, tbh.
You can try to ask for it to be changed, but see explanation above...
This looks totally fine and decent. I bet all the groaning following the post and your friend advice comes form American culture where they are off-biased, where a total idiot is said to be smart guy and ordinary guy is said to be genius... Is it really Swiss style too?
Hey, you wrote in the beginning that the supervisor and the company in general did not care about your aspiration and whatsoever but just required you to fulfil the duties you agreed to perform by accepting the contract. Are you surprised that hey honestly keep their position on that matter? You did a good move that you quit if that job turned out not to be the one you expected but stop that crying nonsense that they should have realise how big asset you are and should have listen to you, change the job expectation towards you, and so on so on
Disclaimer*
I expressed only my personal opinions which are not legally binding. You are not entitled to reproduce it in any form or use thereafter.
Anyway I only started reading this thread because I was surprised the reference letter is still in use in Switzerland.
I don't think you have much knowledge or experience of HR processes in Switzerland, do you? Swiss references -- which are pretty much required by the new employer if you want to move to a new job in Switzerland -- are famously written in code. Everyone here who has said that "satisfactory", "pleasant", etc. are code for the opposite is absolutely correct.
You still have not the slightest clue what you're talking about, which you even pointed out yourself. And stop with the American culture babbling, it has nothing to do with it. With potential employees being on a scale from "unsatisfactory" to "excellent", no one would go with the "satisfactory" one. Except you, apparently.
Well, I'm polish. Satisfactory word said in Poland means the same as excellent or outstanding word said in America. If you do a good job but you would praise yourself as outstanding prepare that you will not get through on the interview in Poland. People will reject you simply as it's clear that you would behave antisocial if you think you are so special whilst apparently you are not the next Newton. I'm using the expression 'American style' as it is well known in PL to adjust up all the adjectives when translating anything to be understood properly by the foreigners from the other side of the ocean.
I just relocated to different branch of the corporation, that's how I appeared in Switzerland. Perhaps as you said on Swiss employer would hire me simply because they are prejudiced to blatant language in the application. Good to know, thank you for sharing the culture knowledge.
This is not about behaviour or culture or arrogance or how someone presents themselves or anything of that kind. It is about the simple fact that the word "satisfactory" is not "very good", in presumably any language. And in a reference, written or otherwise, it is pretty much the worst you can get. Satisfactory is, as your dictionary link pointed out, just good enough. Which is right on the threshold of average and bad.
If you go for dinner and consider the food you order "satisfactory", that is the same as "excellent" in your book? I really doubt it. Would you go back to a place where you thought the food was "satisfactory" or would you go back to one where you thought the food was "excellent" or at the very least "very good"?
Since you insist, let me reply for the last time in this thread. I am beginning to feel sorry for hijacking unintentionally the OP's thread. Yes I am going back to restaurants which serve satisfactory meals. I prefer one serving excellent food. The facts have nothing to do with not going to places serving bad meals nor with the fact that it is hard to find places serving excellent food and in my way of judging the world I would not pretend to myself that common restaurant X serving satisfactory meals serves excellent food just to boost my ego when I go there. Well, it is too subjective matter...
Leoo, you are just going to have to accept that the Swiss will avoid direct confrontation and wordings if at all possible in this context. There was a time where people were not happy until it said "performed to our fullest satisfaction", which makes no linguistic sense, as full is actually already 100%, at least that's what our German teacher in Gymnasium tried to drill into our heads - there is no more super than a superlative, just like there is no such thing as the mostest.
I have the frustrating task of sometimes reading reference letters written in English by non-natives and I swear I have corrected the same three mistakes four times now, pointed this out to "person in charge" and still they use the same turn of phrase. My most hated one is "he/she made a convincing impression" (probably from "er/sie hatte ein überzeugendes Auftreten") - I may be wrong, but to me that sounds like someone was impersonating a model employee rather than actually being one. Feel free to put me right, as I would welcome just letting that particular one be.
As for the OP's situation - are you familiar with the Halo effect? Your behaviour now is probably affecting the memory of how you were when you were still working for 'Megacorp'. And if that behaviour was maybe not 100% what they wanted, then you are probably just making them rate you even lower by being a pain.
Stupid question - do you really need the revised reference letter if the RAV said don't bother at this point? I would just forget about it and about your previous employer and go on applying for jobs. Maybe I'm too pragmatic and/or underestimate the power of the reference letter. I kept mine from my time in Switzerland more for the memories, but I don't even remember what they wrote except it sounded good.
I might go back and look at what's written in it, hopefully it doesn't say "satisfactory" according to this thread!
I've lived and worked here for almost thirty years and during that time I've held several professional positions at Swiss firms and been involved in the recruitment for 10+ positions and yet I have never encountered a single reference written in code! And yes I've had people who claim to know the code look at them.
There was a time, a long time ago when this kind of thing was done, but it is now illegal to give a bad reference from what I remember and that with the RAV reviewing them makes me think it is just an urban myth at this stage.
Furthermore I have never provided references for any of the positions I held, even when asked! And that included one of our two big banks, where the HR person simply shrugged his shoulders to my response and went on with signing the contract.
It means exactly what is says it means! I've seen the same statement on several references from IT staff and one occasion the HR guys even got the new employee go back to his former employer and get it stated clearly that he had left of his own free will.
I would not loose any sleep over it if I were you. But Switzerland is a small place where everyone knows everyone, especially in IT, so you can expect unofficial phone calls will be made.... after 30 years here I get maybe 4 or 5 calls per year, including one last year where a former colleague read a paragraph from the candidate's resume and asked me if it was true - sadly it had been lifted word for word from my resume!!!
While individual employees don't necessarily know every other employee, you don't need to follow six degrees of separation to find someone on your new job to know someone at your old job and have a quick chat over Skype or WhatsApp.
People get around a lot. If you have Swiss contacts in LinkedIn or Xing, you'll realize that after a while (if you don't change jobs yourself).
Case in point: one of my co-workers left and we were kind of glad about it.
(Our team, and other teams, too. He was obviously unhappy, too).
In his new job, one of his co-workers is apparently a friend of the head of another team.
He was quickly briefed...
Just because you moved to Bern doesn't mean that people don't know somebody in Zurich.
You really have to be careful which bridges you burn.