Of Expending Horizon

With a career spanning 17 years, Hemi Hossain, a global professional coach and a digital entrepreneur who quit his job to start six businesses in Australia, becomes a life coach. He specializes in training people on what he has learned to help them get their dream jobs and pass on the learnings he himself has amassed to others. He is a certified human behavior consultant and offers courses to add to both soft skills and hard skills for comprehensive development. He does it through an institution called Career Hub which just rolled out its operations this month. He tells Colors about the aim behind binging this business to Bangladesh and his idea of job fulfillment.

Over coffee, Hemi Hossain, the managing director of Career Hub, explains that the institution is about helping people make great careers by becoming who they want to be and is something that he always wanted to bring to Bangladesh. “I have three segments catered to three different groups of people seeking different things,” he says, Being a Neuro-Linguistics Programming (NLP) practitioner, he has a better understanding of how people opt to act upon their goals. There are specialized courses provided for entrepreneurs and courses for professionals seeking to grow careers. The most recent addition includes a diploma in digital entrepreneurship that combines skills development and leadership. Career Hub also provides the CHR (Certified Human Resource) program, an international certification running in 118 right now. Apart from being a well-known digital entrepreneur, he has a couple of colleges in Australia which he plans to involve to offer courses here in Bangladesh.

The courses help people develop specific skills to expand their skill set horizons and to diversify their portfolio of skills. Popular courses in this section include graphic designing and digital marketing. The third part focuses on teaching soft skills to people such a negotiation and leadership, which form an integral part of both the corporate world and entrepreneurship. They provide certifications that give students an added qualification to enhance their academics in a particular arena.

During his long stay In Australia he recognized Bengalis struggling to get white collar jobs and it wasn’t because of their lacking in technical skills. He recalls he noticed that Bengalis were ready to work hard but most of them did not know where to put in efforts while many lacked in the essential soft skills needed to climb up the corporate ladder.

He joined the corporate world in Australia and has worked for one of the largest bank there. As his last job he was also the senior manager of a telco company where he served as the strategy maker of IT. Having worked for 15 years in the corporate arena, he began to feel the need to step into the next level and moved to life coaching.

He spent the last six years learning human skills and then turned to coaching as a professional business and started investing in different areas of business himself. He points out that 65 per cent of the young graduates in Bangladesh, who account for such a big resource, lack in terms of having a vision as they jump into academic goals signing up for graduation degrees. He adds, “While Bangladeshis are great at working hard, they don’t know how to multiply and grow. If you want to do that, you need to learn the right way and know how to hone and combine your skills to reach your goals and then keep at it.”

His plan is to introduce the new learnings in Bangladesh, including f-commerce and Artificial Intelligence (AI) so that the country can always stay up to speed when it comes to competing with the human resources of other countries.

Hemi emphasizes how many young people have a tunnel vision of focusing on a particular skill or a goal due to which they forget to take a comprehensive look at it. He stresses that entrepreneurs don’t just need a fixed set of skills to succeed but they must be ready to, a) take on the mindset of growth and continuous learning, and,, b) truly identify and realize their goals before starting with execution. He points out that these two things are often left out by enthusiastic young entrepreneurs before they venture out with their great ideas and that is where Career Hub comes into play.

One who is the winner of Best Business Award, provided by Small Business Award in Victoria, Hemi claims that the present time requires us to be more committed to learning and open to new knowledge and skills than ever before. “Being proficient at one crucial task is no longer enough to land you your dream job and you must continuously seek to expand your horizon in this world where stretching yourself is the only way to go ahead while sustaining the distance travelled,” he says.

At Career Hub, he has designed short courses on teaching people integral and futuristic skills such as leadership, communications and understanding KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of businesses. He explains that people learn differently because we all have different neuropaths. While all the neuropath grows within the first seven years of your life, as opposed to popular belief, new ones can be developed with discipline. New neuropaths can be developed if the mind is trained in the right way and this includes how an individual looks at his own belief system, values and communication and how much he/she is willing to re-adjust them. This, he says, is exactly how people to give up bad habits and NPL plays a big part in here.

In Bangladesh, traditional ways are more popular that these effective and innovative ways to develop human resources where he plans to make a difference. NPL techniques are used all over the world and it has been proven to be effective and numerous global companies use NPL for coaching their employees. A new neuropath is created whenever you are introduced to a new idea or perception, but it needs gentle reminders and pushes to thrive. How much it develops depends on the actions and level of commitment an individual is willing to give, and a life coach can play the part of a game changer here. “It is just like waking up everyday at 5 a.m. to go for a run for 60 straight days will form a habit and no matter how difficult it seems to be for a night owl, it is possible with the right amount of effort and persistence put in,” he says.

Currently they are working on running a two-day communication and leadership workshop in Bangladesh and Malaysia. Hemi plans to continuously run such seminars to enlighten people to fight the growing rate of unemployment.

It is important that parents teach children to ask ‘why they do, what they do’ and that is where realizing your field of interest begins. Growing up an individual needs to question his/her actions to get to their vision and once decided they can plan the steps needed. “If you cannot do that yourself seek professional help. Just one seminar is not enough get a professional coach. While it is a very common thing abroad to have a professional coach, it is still a very rare concept in Bangladesh,” Hemi suggests.

For effectively evaluating career options Hemi shares the easy hack of checking the three P’s: Passion purpose and profit. “If you still can’t decide, go ahead and try out the options. You can always switch, and you would rather switch numerous times and be working where you belong to, than be stuck somewhere with goals that do not align with your true purpose. Learn from specialized individuals rather than paying lump sum amounts to universities offering generic curriculums. Soon it will become outdated as it requires both more time and money.”

Hemi has inspired the lives of over one million in four different countries, from over 100 industries online and offline through his mentoring and coaching. Hemi Hossain believes in cumulative success and gauges his own achievement by seeing the success of the people he coached and of society.