Khalid Pervez, Chairman IEEEP Karachi Centre & CEO KPWS Consulting
If we, the seniors, have attained some good professional standing, we owe a great deal of it to our mentors and those former bosses who valued our success, and of course, those colleagues and friends who supported us in our patchy journey. Isn’t it then our responsibility to give back to those who stand where we stood once?
Comparing it with Corporate Social Responsibility [CSR], let’s coin the term ‘Individual Professional Responsibility’ [IPR] to describe our obligations towards young engineers and professionals and move on with it with the sincerity of purpose.
The first and foremost attribute we all must have in this quest is respect for all regardless of one’s position, education, competence, etc. Our interactions with juniors must provide healthy and nurturing feelings to them. Then, we shouldn’t expect anything in return; we already had enough of it. Investing on people is a highly enriching process for the giver. Often, we’re reluctant in this invaluable investment from the fear that our trained and groomed people could leave us and take away with them all our investment. But that’s a very introverted and self-serving mindset. We simply cannot assess the personal loss, sometimes spanning years, to those who worked for us but were not trained and groomed due to our self-created fear.
Most regrettably, we find large number of professionals, mostly in O&M and contracting, who spent a good portion of their active life with the same company but didn’t grow up appropriately in their primary and allied domains due to shear neglect and indifferent attitude of their employers. What a great personal and national loss!
Considering ‘Individual Professional Responsibility’ as our moral and professional obligation, let’s devise the following mission:
We’ll take all necessary measures to ensure that those working under us, regardless of their ranks, are duly respected, encouraged, given a congenial atmosphere, appreciated for their creativity and out-of-box ideas and they are given opportunities for on-the-job training and advancement in primary and allied domains.
Let’s be certain that Allah SWT always helps people who help others.
