Message from the President Apr.2007

It’s that time of year again when we welcome newly employed graduates. Since last year, our induction ceremony has been extended to include the entire Meitec Group, with new Meitec and Meitec Fielders employees joining 85 Chinese staff who entered Meitec Global Solutions last financial year, as we welcomed a total of some 430 new staff. Thanks to everyone’s help, the number of mid-career recruitment staff at Meitec last fiscal year passed 150, with Meitec Fielders engaging more than 100, bringing the total of strategic new staff strength in the Meitec Group to more than 250 people. In the past 12 months, therefore, the Meitec Group has welcomed approximately 680 new hires.

Joining with these new colleagues to build an even stronger professional collective will give the Meitec Group its ability to grow. But particularly for those people who are new colleagues, as part of what it means to be a professional, it’s important that we all share a clear understanding about remuneration for our work.

Generally speaking, the remuneration an individual receives for his or her work is twofold. The first is remuneration in the form of wages. The second is remuneration in the form of experience. Wages are concrete and easy to understand, so we tend to focus mostly on them, but I’d like you to consider the notion that over the medium to long term, the remuneration of experience becomes much more important. I believe the fact that experience becomes remuneration is already self-evident to those staff who’ve been with the corporate group for some time and who approach their daily work with a professional attitude. But whether one reaches an early realization that experience is also a form of remuneration often affects how a person becomes established as a professional, and so I’d like to take some time to discuss it here.

Let’s suppose that we complete job A and receive a certain level of wage for it. But even if we succeed in doing job A, if we’re only ever able to do job A, the quality and quantity of work we can do will remain unchanged. This means, therefore, that the wages we can earn will always remain unchanged. Worse, if society’s need for job A disappears, we’ll have to face the fact that the only job we can do no longer exists. On the other hand, if we don’t just do job A, but also, while working, think about our relationship with our work, we’ll make a number of discoveries. For example, as we work we could think first about what we might do to become skilled in how to do the job, or whether there’s perhaps a more efficient way to do the job, or why wastage or errors happen in the job and what we might do to eliminate them. In the course of that process, we’ll find that our thinking becomes deeper, and we’ll become aware that raising the efficiency of the work overall and boosting the outcomes doesn’t depend on us alone; communication with the people with whom we’re doing the job is important. We might also think about other work that’s linked to the job we’re doing, and find our thinking extending to the skills or techniques we must learn for higher-level process tasks than job A.

In other words, the difference between just doing a job, and thinking about our relationship with our work as we do it, is the difference between whether we want to enhance our occupational ability or not. Just doing a job means exercising the occupational ability we currently have (output). But thinking about our relationship with our work as we do it exercises the occupational ability we have currently, while also making that job an experience that enhances our occupational ability (simultaneous output and input). I believe that the motivation to enhance one’s own occupational ability is the starting point of professionalism. To our newly employed graduates in particular, obviously all the people around you have greater occupational ability than yourself, which means you’re in the best position to learn, and you have the opportunity to find motivation by aspiring to be like the person next to you. There’s a certain truth to the notion that enhancing one’s occupational ability is synonymous with enhancing one’s market worth, which is synonymous with enhancing one’s future remuneration, and that’s what’s formally described as enhancing one’s career. True career enhancement, however, isn’t just about enhancing one’s remuneration, it’s about increasing the degree to which one engages with society through one’s work?in other words, increasing the degree to which one contributes to society. I hope that you’ll come to an early realization about how important it is to be able to take pride in your occupation, and thereby join the ranks of the true professionals as soon as you’re able.

There’s certainly no question that it’s better for you to receive twofold remuneration for doing a single job.