How he struggled to get a job with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering and decided to teach himself many other profitable skills

Watch the full interview here : 

In this episode of Stories of Hackers, we chatted with Fitri. Fitir has a Masters in Mechanical Engineering but with the impact of covid, he struggled to land himself a job. He then decided to teach himself many other profitable skills instead of just waiting for a perfect job to come. We hope you guys can learn some new insights through Fitri’s experience and his story, enjoy!

Hey can you start by introducing your background and also your story to our community?

Hi, my name is Fitri.  I'm actually a postgraduate in Mechanical Engineering. I did my degree here in Malaysia and then right after degree i decided i should do my master's instead because at that time you know just having a degree wasn't really enough to get a job. I did my master's in Manchester, UK for a year in mechanical engineering design and then as soon as I graduated and I came back to Malaysia, covid happened and  I couldn't land a job at all in engineering. I tried to apply when I was there in the UK but I couldn't get a job as well because over there they had really strict rules for foreigners to work there.

When I came back to Malaysia, covid happened and I was forced to stay home for a few months and because i was just tired sitting at home, I have a podcast as well. It's called kongsi podcast, shameless plug, but hey if anyone wants to give it a listen. 

While in the midst of doing that, I actually got an opportunity as well to do a bit of I.T. work. My first job was just helping put up PCs in the government office. From there, I did more government work which involved putting up PCs and eventually I got a job working for a company that was under contract for HP , so I helped to fix HP products, went to either houses or enterprise buildings like offices to help the users to troubleshoot the products. 

Not long after that, MCO 2.0 hit and I was out of job, again. Luckily, my ex-manager  invited me to try and do real estate instead so i've been doing that for the past five months. I've been trying to sell houses and helped my colleagues sell houses but i haven't landed one myself. i'm hoping to get one soon because in real estate, you just need that one big break, i'm not gonna make it sound so money hungry but one big break and that’s really all you need for the rest of the year.

TL:DR I'm just a real estate guy who's really good in I.T. with the background in mechanical engineering and recently ventured into videography and photography as well because real estate needs a lot of photos and  photography sort of has been like a side a hobby of mine so I'm putting that to use as well.

If people want to follow your footsteps, i mean how do they become a multi-tasker like what you are? Because in this day and age, where we live right now,we have to become somewhat the jack of all trades right?

The passion to learn, that's all I can say. The passion to learn and the will to survive . No one is actually looking for one guy who excels in one thing and is completely useless in others right? No one expected the covid outbreak to happen too, so mental preparedness for you knowing that the world's going to change at any given moment. I think that's sort of like what drove me to really try to learn a lot of things because it's just a will to survive as well and the passion to learn i guess, yeah.

Now that you've you've been through so many fields, if you had to choose just one field to focus on your career for the next five years as in you think will make the most money or with the biggest opportunity, which career would you choose, and why?

Personally, i think sales is the best because with engineering, videography and all that other skill i have, it’s a technical skills and a specialty skill, it's not something that you're able to use anywhere but if you're in sales marketing, those are the kind of skills that's more general and when you excel in this, you can literally survive, you can pitch anything, any kind of idea to people, you can go very far. 

Interesting, personally I think the ability to sell is one of the important skills too. Now, what is the advice that you can give for people out there who want to maximize their income? 

Learning to get online, that's the one thing that I think the Malaysians have been obviously slow compared to our western counterparts of the world. Just getting everything online. That's the only thing with our society right now in Malaysia, it's like we just have a lot of all these non-online stuff yet so if you can get them online, i think that's really a business venture.

What’s the big vision you have for yourself, maybe for the next five years? 

To be honest, that's a big question though.I can't really answer that definitely because you know five years from now no one knows what's gonna happen again. I would say I'm always up for these two things that I really want to do. One, of course, is to start something, start a company or an enterprise or something. Another thing, well, it’s going very deep, there's this thing that I truly believe ever since I've heard this quote: “all living things on this planet will only have two things that they're supposed to do, is they grow old and they either reproduce or pass on knowledge.” 

I've always believed that whatever you do in life at the end of that life you're supposed to pass on whatever you've learned, to your children or your company. Pass on whatever you've learned to the next person, so they can grow from that and make the world a better place.

Thanks for the awesome interview !

Hope you enjoyed this series!

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