Fellow toastmasters and guests… a very good evening to you. my name is IC Ooi.

The title of my speech is about me. There are only 4 to 6 minutes available for this speech and I’ve lived for more than 40 years now. It’s definitely going to take more than just 4 minutes to tell you everything about me. And so, instead of giving you a vague overall description of who I am, I’ll share with you my career and working experience so you can know me more from that perspective.

My first professional job was a product engineer with Intel. My primary area was in test. I developed test programs and failure analysis for yield improvements. The job was very technical. Overtime, I felt that it wasn’t the type of job for me. I got tired of working with machines and computers and being confined in labs and factory. I wanted to deal with people and go out and see the world. After 2 years, I resigned from Intel and joined a small local company as a sales engineer.

The work nature and environment was totally different from Intel. From a huge multi-national organization employing thousands of employees to a company of 15 people, occupying the 2^nd floor of a shop lot in Jelutong. That was the company I got myself into and spent my next 4 years. I worked very hard and because of that, I learned many things about closing sales, preparing sales budget, developing new markets etc…and I worked hard because I enjoyed it. Eventually, I was promoted to became sales manager. I had to do a lot of traveling and entertainment, which was fine with me at that time, until I got married. My priorities changed. My focus changed. I realized that I couldn’t go on doing what I was doing anymore. Opportunity came when Intel set up commodity team in Kulim and I was the candidate they looked for.

I rejoined Intel as materials engineer, then switch to commercial as commodity specialist and eventually became the commodity manager. I thought I was going into a less hectic job. It turned out that I traveled even more. Within the 4 years in commodity management, I’ve traveled dozens of times to the US, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, India and Singapore. It was exciting at the beginning but I burned out towards the end. I spend another 2 years in supply chain management as Outsource Program Manager dealing with sub cons in China before I made a 90 degree turn in my career path. I switched to HR department at Intel to become the Training Manager.

It’s a totally different skill set all together. Nothing related to what I had done up to that point. I continued to move on within HR to become HR Business Partner for one of the business units. In that role, I served as HR advisor to the business group. Then, another change came. I got the position of an Operations Manager within a business unit which I’ve been doing until today…

So to summarize, my professional career started from technical to sale and marketing to supply chain management to training and HR and now Operations Management. While going through these positions, I’ve also been an active instructor and facilitator both in Intel and outside Intel. I’ll most likely to continue the Ops Manager role for a while before the next change.

I hope with this short introduction, you now know me more in terms of what do and my professional background. There are many other wonderful things about me that you will find interesting and I’ll be more than happy to share with you when we have time. For now, this is all about me.

Thank you..