For this year Board of Governors talk, it was Mr Alex Siow's turn. He came to gave an inspiring talk to the Director List students about how to excel in an IT career. The Board of Governors are the people who manage Informatics & IT School and they take turns to come to our school to give talks and share information with the students.
Mr Alex Siao & Mr Ng Koon Seng, Deputy Director of Temasek Polytechnic Informatics & IT School.
Our Director List students attending the talk
Here is some background information about him. Being Head of Business Excellence and System Technology, Starhub, he is well-known personality in the industry. In 1995, he was nominated by Computerworld Singapore as one of the top 10 most powerful IT personalities and IT Person of the Year 2002 by the Singapore Computer Society. He was formerly the Chief Information Officer(CIO) of the Housing Development Board of Singapore and was conferred the Public Administration Medal Bronze award in 1993 and the Silver award in 2000.
He shared with us lots of his wonderful experiences. One of the most amazing thing is he was a civil engineer yet he created a huge wave in Singapore's IT industry. At first he did not want to enter the IT industry. However, in the end, he still became one of the first few CIO in Singapore. One of the main reason was his success was that he taught his subordinates all his skills and knowledge. Even if he hates his job, he still give it his best and never complains.
Mr Alex Siow also shared about soft skills necessary to become a CIO or basically any job. Skills such as communication is very important, he emphasised on being good at English as its the language we use to communicate. Having the basic soft skills is not enough, we also need to learn to mentor others and be selfless. He mentioned that we have to teach others how to be good at what we do so as we can move on to other jobs. Learning is an endless process and we have to keep learning to improve ourselves and prove that we can be capable in other jobs so as to move up the working ladder.
Mr Alex Siow also shared about soft skills necessary to become a CIO or basically any job. Skills such as communication is very important, he emphasised on being good at English as its the language we use to communicate. Having the basic soft skills is not enough, we also need to learn to mentor others and be selfless. He mentioned that we have to teach others how to be good at what we do so as we can move on to other jobs. Learning is an endless process and we have to keep learning to improve ourselves and prove that we can be capable in other jobs so as to move up the working ladder.
Finally, I would like to end this post with his favourite saying, Never say never.
