Wednesday, January 16, 2008

"Indian Job Niche Market"

Indians have a niche job market. Have you realized that? Purely speaking from factual observation and with no racist slants.

Indians in Malaysia are split into 2 groups - the educated and the not.

Roughly, the uneducated become car washmen, guards, plantation workers, odd job labourers, people who work for city councils, etc. They are at the bottom of the skill and value adding chain, and the most they can hope to achieve to make it big is to open a restaurant and make it successful.

The educated become lawyers, politicians, doctors and I have just realized, HR practitioners.

I noticed that generally, besides Union leaders comprising of an unproportionately high number of Indians, a certain company's HR department is heavily dominated by Indians.

This company's HR department is well known throughout the company for being ... well lets just say not held in high esteem. And when we analyze the personality n chracter traits of the dept's personnel, we notice certain endemic traits that are quite common among them and which very likely have shaped and influenced the entire dept and its delivery capability and hence its reputation.

But the field of HR practicing is actually not that wishy washy. There are plenty of HR guys out there who do good work. HR is quite an integral part of a company. The best managers are people managers, not necessarily subject matter experts.

Hence I am now pursueing the interesting angle of whether that company's HR dept's shabby practices are a result of the field of HR being so and the state of this company's HR would be the same regardless of who is in it, or is the race and the people's inherent habits spilling over into their work or whether only certain types of people are attracted to and can work in HR (just like engineering, marketing, etc).


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