Night markets & new markets
My Social Sabbatical Adventures pt. 2
Sawadee ka!
After the first half of my one-month Social Sabbatical, I already feel like I’ve been given a peek inside a whole new world. Bangkok is well renowned for its vibrant markets, scattered throughout the city on almost any given night, admired for its mouthwatering street food, and loved by almost every visitor. While it is not my first time in Bangkok, I’m now getting to explore the city from entirely new perspectives — I haven’t visited any of the touristy places so far during the past two weeks. Besides, I have already gained so many new insights through my fellow SAP colleagues as well as through the project I’m working on.
The Bangkok group of SAP colleagues is divided into teams of three, supporting four different client organizations. In my project team, I’m working together with a Polish colleague located in Budapest and an Italian colleague located in Aix-en-Provence. We’re not only culturally speaking a highly diverse team, but also when it comes to our work backgrounds at SAP as we merge the worlds of Human Resources and recruiting, Industry Value Engineering and Sales as well as Corporate Entrepreneurship and Strategic Design.
Our client organization is CareerVisa, a social startup that aims to bridge the gap between employers and talents in Thailand. CareerVisa offers career assessments, career coaching, and employer branding services as well as organizes career development and matching events. With over five years of experience, the social startup has connected students from more than 20 universities with companies and owns a big database of potential candidates. CareerVisa’s vision is to transform the Thai workforce by closing the skills gap and creating change-makers to digitally transform organizations for the future. With 78% of jobs in Asia Pacific and Japan impacted by digital disruption, one of the key challenges is a lack of capable change-makers. This skills gap is especially prevalent in Thailand, which falls back behind its Southeast Asian neighbors in talent competitiveness and struggles to match their education gains.
My project team supports CareerVisa as pro bono consultants in creating an organizational strategy for a new recruitment service. Within the four-week project duration, we aim to enhance CareerVisa’s job matching and skills development platform. Our office is the Common Ground coworking space, which provides a nice change to my usual SAP office.
In the past two weeks, I’ve already applied my background in human-centered design and Design Thinking. The first week was dedicated to understanding the problem — which in our case meant conducting research to recognize the needs Thai companies have in recruitment and digital transformation. Apart from gaining valuable insights that helped us in the project, another nice side effect of our interviews was that we got to see different neighborhoods and talk to different organizations in Bangkok. From manufacturing companies producing rice flour or bathroom and home decor, to a software design consultancy and an IT Venture Builder, we got a glimpse into various segments of Thailand’s business world and better understood the challenges they’re facing.
During the second week, we created a persona based on our research interviews, iterated on the problem statement, crafted a future customer experience journey, facilitated two engaging ideation sessions with the CareerVisa team, fleshed out some of these ideas and started with a market analysis. Knowing that the project scope is well defined, I’m still impressed by how much you can achieve within such a limited time frame and team. While the methodology applied is not new to me, the context definitely is — and I’m excited to see it all come together in the next two weeks!
