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Mastering these three skills is essential not only for overcoming challenges but also for fostering meaningful connections and trust, says Rashidin Omar, Asst. General Manager, Remuneration & Performance Management.
As businesses navigate the complexities of digital transformation, learning and development (L&D) has become a strategic pillar in ensuring workforces remain adaptable and future-ready.
With technology evolving at an accelerated pace, Telekom Malaysia’s L&D strategy is designed to align with key industry trends, including a technology-driven change experience, focusing on business-driven projects, enhancing digital and data literacy, and equipping employees with future-ready skills in emerging technologies.
In this edition of Upskilling 101, Sarah Gideon speaks with Rashidin Omar, Asst. General Manager, Remuneration & Performance Management, Telekom Malaysia, (pictured above) to explore what this strategy means for employees, and how Rashidin and his team are building the critical skills needed for an adaptable, future-oriented workforce.
Q How has your organisation adapted its learning and development strategy to meet the challenges and opportunities of 2025?
While Telekom Malaysia is in its second phase of transformation journey to becoming a Digital Powerhouse 2030, challenges revolved around equipping our people with the skills that are adaptable and future oriented. While technology in telecommunication has evolved at a much faster pace, the role of learning and development has become more prominent than ever. Hence, our strategy to learning and development is tailored towards aligning with such trends, which includes:
- Technology-driven change experience – business-driven project on targeting business big-bets,
- Digital and data literacy programme – a programme for everyone in building a data conversant workforce, and
- Future-driven skills – focusing on future prospects of B2C, B2B, and C2C such as AI & automation, data centre, and edge facilities.
Q What are the hottest, function-agnostic skills in your industry today – skills that will never fail you?
In today's rapidly evolving business environment, dealing with the unexpected has become a norm and eventually designed as a baseline for a good talent. To have that quality, I believe the most critical function-agnostic skills within the industry today that will consistently drive success are critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and stakeholder management.
Critical thinking enables the effective analysis and resolution of complex challenges, while emotional intelligence is pivotal in building strong and driving leadership. Stakeholder management, from the other lens, is key to ensuring we are building a trusting relationship, not only with our shareholders, but to a broader society and country.
These skills are relevant today and remain valuable in the future, especially in addressing the unexpected.
Q How are you building these skills in your workforce? Essentially, how do you help employees accelerate their learning (especially when it comes to soft skills)?
While learning has now become more personalised than ever, there are various approaches were put in place in making learning much more interactive and desirable. While we continue to conduct the learning experience through conventional classroom training, we have developed few other hybrid methods in extending people's capabilities, which include:
- Learning through competition – we organise hackathons for people across the organisation to develop a use case and utilise their core skills and expand their soft skills – led people to exercise their critical thinking, storytelling, and stakeholder management skills,
- Micro-learning – bite-sized modules through LinkedIn Learning, where the modules were personalised to people's preferences and interest, this is supported with our Learning Friday programme where we let people to divert themselves from working and use the Friday mornings to learning at their own comfort, and
- Project-led initiatives – we provide the liberty for people to establish their own project teams with guidance from the Management teams, and manage the team themselves – another platform that supports this approach is our Agile Transformation team, where they provide a structured mechanism in handling projects in an agile manner, and this has bring about greater business outcomes and eventually trained our people to become better project managers and team players.
Q On the HR front - What are the top 3 most critical skills your organisation is prioritising for the future, and how are you cultivating them? Personally speaking, how are you, as a leader, upskilling yourself for your role, as well as your HR team?
At the forefront of Telekom Malaysia's transformation to become a Digital Powerhouse by 2030, investments are made towards committing everyone in the organisation to be future-ready. Three skills that are being a commitment to us to further develop includes:
- Digital and technology skills fluency,
- Emotional intelligence that includes being disruptively innovative, entrepreneurial, and boldness, and
- Agile and adaptability in the new way of working.
There are various ways of us at Telekom Malaysia enabling these skills, to name a few - opportunities to lead a project through Agile project workstreams, lab testing at our Innovation Centre, and continuous learning series through classroom training and e-learning platform such as LinkedIn Learning.
Q If you could have any superpower to enhance your learning and development efforts, what would it be and how would you use it to shape the future of work?
What I wish to happen is a learning ecosystem that extends to adaptive learning paths for the people. This is when I believe people can make their own decision in determining their career paths and understand their trajectory. When people have the liberty to curate their own learning plan that suits their career aspirations. This will develop our people to be more independent and nimbler workforce. To materialise this, I believe having these three key areas need to happen,
- An AI-powered learning and career path platform that looks at people's skills and interest, and curate a learning series for them at all levels of work,
- Experiential learning e.g., sandbox programme for people to try-and-tested their intangible knowledge to make a tangible business outcome, and
- A mentoring platform where people can reach out to anyone within the organisation or outside, and provide some alignment towards what our people wants to achieve.
Check out our other Upskilling 101 stories here.
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