Equipped with AI and technology skills, women across Southeast Asia find new career opportunities
Jidapa Nitiwirakun21, Thailand (job skills)
When Jidapa Nitiwirakun was about a year old, her mother noticed that she was not learning to walk. A doctor diagnosed her with muscular dystrophy.
At age 21, she got a job despite the limitations of living with the disease, including the continued loss of muscle strength each year. In September last year, she joined the human resources department at Toyota Tsusho’s Thai headquarters, living independently and working remotely from her home in Pattaya, in Thailand’s coastal Chonburi province. The company is the commercial arm of the Japanese automotive giant.
When she was a child, Nitiwirakun said, “I had a lot of dreams” – from owning a bakery to being a Thai-Japanese interpreter, as she was an anime fan.
While at Pattaya Redemptorist Technological College for People with Disabilities, she was part of Microsoft’s Skills for Jobs program, which teaches basic digital skills to those looking for a job, a promotion or even a career change. She studied digital skills for business, from coding to PowerPoint and AI. She interned at Microsoft Thailand, which boosted her confidence when she was hired to train employees and clients on using Power BI. “I was excited and nervous,” she said.
A visit from Toyota Tsusho recruiters led to a full-time job as an administrative officer in the human resources department last year. She is currently working on a project to track the company’s carbon footprint, using Power BI, and does the graphic design of internal communications. It uses OpenAI’s Dall-E to generate images, saving time. She uses AI tools at work to help with analysis formulas in Power BI and to summarize information when searching the web.
She continues to volunteer at her old college, “driving” her mechanized wheelchair back and forth to her apartment, 10 minutes away.
Every month, she gives money to her father, mother and grandmother and helps pay her brother’s university fees. “I’m really proud of myself for being able to financially support my family,” she said.
