Employee Interview - Napaphat Chubsuwan -

I kept looking forward without giving up.

I am proud of myself in JKOT now.

Please tell us how you came to join JKOT.

My previous job was also at a factory, and I had always wanted to develop myself through my work. At that time, I found out that JKOT was recruiting new employees, and I felt I had to do my best to change jobs. JKOT is a global company that everyone in Korat knows. It was also attractive to me that JKOT not only expanded its plant and had a variety of facilities and equipment for work such as PCs, but also even had an educational system and welfare schemes in place.

However, I was very worried about whether I should have quit my company and if JKOT would accept me as I was. That was because I am transgender*, which is a sexual minority.

Have you had any difficulties in your job hunting?

Some companies still did not accept sexual minorities. Sometimes I was eliminated in the document screening because my name was male but the person in the picture was female, and sometimes I was told something hurtful during an interview. Looking back at that time, I was very worried and my heart ached, suspecting there were no more companies that would accept my gender. But I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t want to lose. That is why I am so happy to work at JKOT like this now. I want to work as hard as I can at JKOT, which gave me an opportunity not based on my gender but based on my abilities and experience.

How do you want to grow in the future?

I have a wide variety of tasks in the General Administration Department, and I think it is still important for me to accumulate daily work as experience. In so doing, what I can do is to make the most of my communication skills. In order to build a comfortable workplace environment, we need the voices of our employees. I hope I can elicit these voices by talking with many colleagues.

In addition, as an employee of JKOT, I want to become like my manager. I admire my manager, who always faces every single employee honestly, takes good care of them, and notices details quickly. I want to grow as a person so that I can get closer to my manager as much as possible.

As an LGBT person, do you have anything you want to share?

Just as I was able to start working at JKOT, I hope all LGBT people can have the same opportunity. Rather than treating them as unusual, I hope people appreciate individual abilities. Of course, as LGBT people, we should not be passive, but take action to make ourselves understood. I am not sure how much I can do, but first of all I want to expand the community. By connecting with LGBT people in bases around the world and knowing how they are all working and living their lives, I believe we can solve our problems or generate new opinions. It may be a quite big goal, but I hope it will come true someday.

- Editor’s Note (From the Diversity Promotion Office) -

About 259 kilometers northeast of Bangkok, Korat, the largest city in the Isan region of Thailand, is a town where you can enjoy people’s warmth and tranquil scenery unique to Isan. What impressed me during the interview in Korat was a compassionate heart. At JKOT, for example, at the start and end of work and when employees pass each other in the hallway, they greet each other by saying “Sawadee” with a smile. During work, they always took care of their partners with all their heart to see if the partners were able to work comfortably or felt any inconvenience.

During this interview, I was also impressed by the way Nanpaphat -san worked on daily tasks with the feeling of gratitude toward surrounding people in mind. In this way, I felt that mutual respect and sympathy led to diversity at JKOT, which respects diverse backgrounds and allows diverse employees to work together regardless of their gender identity and sexual orientation or disabilities.

We will continue to feature diversity in various countries through interviews with employees active in various countries and regions.

Mihoko Hasegawa, Diversity Promotion Office