Dr Aung Tun Thet

Dr Aung Tun Thet is a professor and retired principal officer at the UN System Staff College in Turin, Italy. The Myanmar Times reporter Nyunt Win spoke to him when he recently visited Yangon.

» How do you define a professional?

Some have misinterpreted “professional” as “one who works for money”. For me, a professional is a person who is skillful and has a lot of knowledge in a particular field. He is also accountable for criticising or commenting on the subject he specialises. In the United Nations, staff are classified into two groups – professionals and general service. Another meaning for professional is who has enough skill in a profession to work and earn a living in it.

» Do you think a person can be trained to become a professional?

Universities or colleges just certify that you have been taught to earn a living in the area you specialise in. That means you have passed the first stage. But just holding a certificate, diploma or degree doesn’t mean that you are a professional. You just have the technical skills or “hard skills”. To become a professional, you must have to also have “soft skills”. Soft skills are those related to mental ability, such as communicating or social dealings. A professional also needs to have a sympathetic mindset, ability to work as part of a team and be able to organise other people. A person can be called successful if he has both hard and soft skills.

» What are professional ethics?

Professionals must have their own sense of what is right and fair in connection with their job. We say professional integrity or professional honesty. An attorney mustn’t go against the law or the truth. A doctor mustn’t perform treatments that disobey medical ethics. An engineer mustn’t construct a bridge if he thinks the project is harmful to people or the natural environment. They must have moral courage to defend what they think is right and fair. Professionals are upright, honest and have high moral standards.

» What is more important for a professional to have: skill or ethics?

A professional must be equipped with two “Cs” – competence and character. I don’t want anybody to think one is more important. We can’t assign any important task to a person who has a good character but doesn’t have any skill. For example, how can we ask a trustworthy person to perform a surgical operation if they are not trained to do so? Similarly, we can’t trust a skillful doctor who is ill-tempered. Both these abilities are integral parts of being a professional. So we can say that a professional is someone who is trying to develop his skills as well as his character at the same time.

» What would happen if a professional lacked either of them?

Why do we go to a doctor or an architect or an engineer or a lawyer? Because we rely on them to have the professional service that we lack – and we trust them. There is nothing worse than if they break that trust. Professionals are trustworthy people. Once they lose that trustworthiness, they fall and it affects the whole profession too. The whole circle of doctors is affected for a black-sheep doctor.

» What are your words of wisdom for the professionals of Myanmar?

Professionals should never forget the three types of learning: Learning, unlearning and relearning. They must keep learning more knowledge in their respective field for life. But they must also be ready to discard a theory whenever it is no longer suitable, and this is the most difficult part because nobody tends to forget their old knowledge – this is unlearning. Relearning involves approaching an idea from a different angle.

» How important are professionals for a country?

In any country, a professional must have pride in their own profession, which has nothing to do with money, and they need to be accountable. A developing country requires more collective effort from the educated. The more professional they are the more beneficial it is for their country as professionals can help increase the quality of human capital.

» Do you have anything to add?

I’d like to urge all professionals to be set with three energies – physical energy, mental energy and spiritual energy. Professionals need to take a certain kind of exercise for their fitness. For the mental energy, they are supposed to try to develop their intelligence quotient (IQ) and emotional quotient (EQ). Higher IQ will help them develop their hard skills in their subjects, and higher EQ levels will also enable to be easily fit in any organisation. And regardless of their religion, they should have had a firm set of spiritual beliefs, which is the basis for morality.