Over the years, Mitrais has actively cooperated with some of the great universities in Indonesia as part of our corporate social responsibility commitment to the education sector. We hope that the effort will benefit our employees and contribute to the community and society at large. As one of the leading regional employers of software engineers, Mitrais knows that the future supply of skills needed in its industry is at least partly dependent on the quality of technical and soft-skill teaching in the universities.
I Gusti Putu Kompiang, VP Services of Mitrais, was invited by Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) to be a guest lecturer on 1st March 2017. He took the opportunity to share his take on professionalism with students of the School of Electrical Engineering and Informatics (STEI).
Kompi started the morning class by checking the audiences’ understanding of professionalism and briefly mention the underlying topics, attributes, and its definition based on Oxford dictionaries. He went on to point out that professionalism is actually a stepping-stone to staying competitive in the global market.
He used competency-based people development in Mitrais as a case study to illustrate this. The Mitrais Competency Framework, which is an accurate and fair method of measuring competence for staff and customers, has been developed for 16 years. It drives recruitment and promotion, as well as helping to manage growth and change. Each staff member is reviewed annually starting with self-review, followed by a supervisor review, and finally by a panel review to finalise the result.
Kompi reminded the audience to stay competent, professional, and competitive. He also summed up his view of professionalism, which he sees as being the competencies (soft and hard) that need to be demonstrated and continuously improved upon to stay competitive. He believes that this is a part of embracing the fast-changing world to maintain values which give meaning to life.
Kompi concluded with a quote from Alvin Toffler. “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and re-learn”.
Mitrais encourages its staff to become more informally involved in education outreach work. It gives staff a career development opportunity by applying their skills in a new way, or by giving them a chance to develop new ones. It also gets their staff out into the wider community, where they can enhance their own skills and widen their horizons.
