On Friday last week, Crossworks reached a new milestone of 100 employees under management! With Christmas being just 1 week away, it was both cause for celebration as well as a reminder of the difficult road that the team had taken to get to where we are today. Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock would have been aware of the terrible 3+ years that Myanmar has endured the double whammy of Covid19 and a coup which set the country back significantly. Against the backdrop of massive inflation, rising unemployment and continued climate change and an armed conflict in the countryside, there exists a team that just won’t throw in the towel, resign or hop onto the next flight out in search for better prospects.
Growing 5x in 2 years without a cent of outside investment may seem like an impressive statistic- but the most meaningful thing for me is the individual life stories which now number over a hundred (including those who have left along the way), that I have been privileged to have some impact on. What began 5+ years ago with three original hires now sees us hiring across the length and breath of Myanmar (as the pandemic liberated us to hire beyond just Yangon) and working with 45+ companies from a wide range of industries. Since I’ve already covered some macro observations alongside the release of our 2024 Salary Guide in this Linkedin post, I thought I’d double click on three lives that I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of:
Vum
Fresh Grad —> Social Media Maverick —> Boss
Part of our pioneer batch of employees hired in 2018, Vum started out as a Social Media Maverick fresh out of university. I still remember the interview that I had with him like it was yesterday, where he confidently shared how he would handle different scenarios that was presented to him- there was that spark of a problem solver which only grew throughout the year or so that he’d spend with us. A few weeks into his employment, he would pack his bags and visit Singapore for the first time, dive into the world of media which he knew nothing about and start managing our social platforms from three thousand kilometers away. But that was just the tip of the iceberg of his actual JD…
It didn’t take long before Vum raised his hands and became a video producer for HEAR Myanmar, our side project to showcase another side of Myanmar through 120+ short documentary videos on the people, places culture and lifestyle. We visited numerous states and regions together and it seemed like Vum always had contacts in every state that we visited- from family in Myitkyina where we filmed the Manau festival, to friends in Kayah state where we covered the Kay Htoe Boe festival and long neck ladies. We also visited the Mon state during the floods of 2019 and went to the half completed Myitsone Dam amidst many other escapades in what definitely felt longer than the year or so that he was with us for.
On the way back from one of our many travels, I still recall the question he asked me on whether one should live the hard and fulfilling or easy and simple life. I was trying to get him to stay with the company but he had obligations to take over his family’s trucking business and eventually chose the latter. Vum wasn’t the most ‘qualified’ on paper, didn’t have the ‘right’ skills and experience (or any in fact) for the work which he did but proved to be one of my best hires to date. We stayed in touch as I continued to produce content in and around the country until getting physically unable to move around due to Covid19 and later pausing HEAR Myanmar indefinitely.
When I finally came back to Myanmar in May 2022, I visited Vum in Mandalay, where he is now the general manager overseeing a dozen or so huge trucks with more wheels than I have fingers and several smaller vehicles to go into the villages and townships. He graciously showed me around town and we went to Amarapura about half an hour away to catch the sunset and catch up- it was great to see a Crossworker successfully ‘deployed’ back to contribute to his family’s business and doing so well! A couple of months later, he would be humble enough to share how his fleet was grounded owing to certain issues and he wanted to look for some work through Crossworks- but thankfully that episode was short-lived and business restarted not too long later for him. I visited Vum again earlier in 2023 and was glad to see the operation in full swing and many jobs being provided to drivers, packers and maintenance folks!
Emerald
Platform Admin —> Executive Assistant —> Core Team Player
Emerald graduated from Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore before joining J Rental Centre in 2019, some 4+ years back before getting more involved in Crossworks since 2022. As one of less than 10 team members who were with us since the times of our previous office which we had to close during the height of the pandemic, she has seen some of the worst and best times in the company, and somehow chosen to stay…
Like Vum, Emerald’s first role was with my peer to peer rental platform company to handle customer inquiries, verify new users and assist our owner partners to list their camera gear, creative spaces or event logistics on the website. While her experiences in Singapore were helpful to have a sense of geography, she had no background in filmmaking and needed to learn the ropes by going through hundreds of different SKUs and interacting with my colleagues to figure out what each cameras, lenses, lights, sound equipment or video support gear did.
When things slowed down for JRC in 2020 owing to the pandemic, Emerald actually did a brief stint with another two companies through Crossworks and became our first boomerang hire when things didn’t quite work out with those firms. At the same time, Emerald completed her part-time degree in Computing all while the pandemic unfolded and ravaged the country and world. Having plenty of experiences as a remote employee who had both worked in the old co-working space and from home during the pandemic, she eventually accepted an offer to assist the growing Crossworks internal team in 2022, around the time when we also moved in to our current office space.
Today, Emerald is a solid pillar of support and looked up to by her colleagues in the office, helping every department to keep on track with their goals, managing the company finances and constantly problem solving. She has undoubtedly gained many experiences and skills that would be difficult for most local companies to match, been exposed to (perhaps too much) uncertainty and (hopefully) gained more than a handful of friends that she can keep for a long time through this chapter that she continues to write. I am only looking forward to what 2024 will bring and honoured that folks like her have stuck around for as long as she has, making our mission a personal conviction and giving the best years of her life toward this adventure.
Rakesh
Software developer, devoted dad & resilient fighter
Rakesh joined Crossworks in the midst of Covid19, in mid 2021 as a full stack developer for a tech startup. We had just closed our office not too long ago and I was in Bangladesh in the early days of my travel adventures when Edison recruited him to work for the first company through Crossworks. He eventually got promoted to technical lead and managed a team of 4 for the startup for 2+ years until the company had to cease operations in August 2023 and he was back in the job market.
As a solid talent with startup experience under his belt and plenty of good testimonials from his previous employer, it didn’t take long for him to get another opportunity to work with a Malaysian company through Crossworks. He took a second bet on us but it was a short-lived experience this time as there was a lack of culture fit with him and this company. Not to throw in the towel easily, Crossworks continued to put him through interviews with a handful of companies for a remote position as a full stack developer/technical lead and he recently landed a role with yet another Singaporean firm through us.
Rakesh is however, much more than just a cog in the system- he is a person with a story and an ambition to do more, learn more and expect less. I remember vividly him sharing the joy of his two bundles of joy born about 4 months into his time with the company. They had grown to be almost a year old when I finally met Rakesh in the flesh during my visit in mid 2022. There were even times when I had to take a taxi to hand deliver the payroll whilst lengthy queues were forming at the ATM machines and I had the opportunity to briefly meet him at his humble residences. Such stories of resilience, the ability to raise a family through such tumultuous times and the little role that Crossworks can play in his journey to help him access international job opportunities without leaving the country makes all the toil worthwhile indeed.
Looking ahead
When I think about the enormity of the challenges faced and how much more work there is to do, I am overwhelmed with a quiet confidence that God will make a way as he has always been doing so anyway. This is not my job, a filmmaker from Singapore has little to no business trying to stop the brain drain in a foreign land- and yet this is perhaps my calling. Given how unsuitable and unlikely the situations and circumstances have been for Crossworks’ existence and small success, I take nothing for granted but continue to work each day for more stories of life transformation. What a horror it would be for us to start seeing candidates as nothing but a data point, yet another CV on the table or worse still, money to be made…