Jidapa Nitiwirakun21 years old, Thailand (skills for work)
When Jidapa Nitiwirakun was about one year old, her mother noticed that she had not learned to walk. Her doctor diagnosed her with muscular dystrophy.
The 21-year-old was able to find work despite the limitations of living with the disease, including continued weakness in her muscles every year. Last September, she joined the human resources department at Toyota Tsusho Thailand's head office, working independently and remotely from her home in Pattaya, Chonburi province on the Thai coast. The company is the trading arm of the Japanese auto giant.
Nitiwirakul said that as a child, she was a fan of anime and had “many dreams,” ranging from running a bakery to being an interpreter between Thai and Japanese.
While studying at Pattaya Redemptorist Institute of Technology for Persons with Disabilities, she participated in Microsoft's Skills for Jobs program. The program teaches basic digital skills to people looking to get a job, get promoted, or even change careers. She learned digital skills for business, from coding to PowerPoint to AI. She interned at her Microsoft Thailand and was involved in training customers as well as employees to use her Power BI, which increased her confidence. “I was excited and nervous,” she said.
Last year, after a visit from Toyota Tsusho's recruiting staff, he got a full-time job as a manager in the human resources department. She is currently working on a project to track her company's carbon footprint using Power BI and is designing graphics for internal communications. She uses her Dall-E in OpenAI to generate images and saves time. She uses her AI tools in her work to help with analysis formulas in Power BI and to summarize information when searching the web.
She continues to volunteer at her alma mater, “driving” a mechanized wheelchair to and from her apartment 10 minutes away.
She gives money to her father, mother, and grandmother every month to help pay for her brother's college tuition. “I am so proud to be able to financially support her family,” she said.