Tue, 13 December, 2022
January 2023 marks 23 years of my service for TWI. In the year 2000, I was approached by TWI and was offered the position to manage the regional office in Malaysia.
The old office was a half shop lot in Sungai buloh where we employed 4 people. Myself, Mala our late accountant, an examiner, and a Security officer. During the 23 years, we’ve been able to grow the company from a 4-man operation to having more than 100 people in Malaysia and also our regional offices.
When I started my job at TWI, the principal activities were only taking place in Malaysia. My role was to build the foundation for the development of the business in the region and to extend our presence in different countries across the Southeast Asia region either through offices or agencies.
When I started, the plan was to indigenize the business by selecting qualified local talent and training them to the standards required by TWI to deliver the training locally. This, in turn, helped us to expand the range of the training courses we offered to our clients in the region.
Starting with Welding Inspection training only, then we moved on into the NDT training range and then we expanded the welding bays and started offering the rest of the training courses subsequently.
The financial turnover at the time was around 700’000 GPB annually with very few selected training courses being delivered by UK lecturers. My first achievement was starting to get government contracts in Malaysia. Our best year was 2014 when we managed to increase the turnover to 10 million GBP.
After the business became stable in Malaysia, I started traveling to other countries across the region, evaluating the market for potential growth. We started with agency agreements and selected countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, and China were converted to official TWI offices. We also had an office in Australia that over time, it was decided to shift back to an approved agency. Maintaining the integrity of TWI in a challenging market was a major difficulty, however, I would like to emphasize the amazing team that I have assembled. I believe the secret to our success has been our staff whom I was able to rely on.
Recently I am promoted to the Global Training Manager position. Moving forward, I will be able to mentor the regional managers in our global subsidiaries and share my knowledge with them.
The future looks bright. The oil and gas industry being cyclical, I can see a comeback in the industry which is heavily influential to the performance of our business. I see the next 5- 10 years being good years for TWI training and certification as well as engineering businesses.