Fri, 22 January, 2021
With a wealth of knowledge and experience in the petrochemical and pipeline industries, Junaidi is one of the key lecturers in TWI South East Asia’s welding inspection team.
Mohd Junaidi bin Minhat, born in Melaka, Malaysia, completed his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at UITM. Once graduated, he started his career as a draftsman at a consultation company. This job gave him the opportunity to learn how to create and interpret draftsman drawings. However, after a few months, he decided on a career shift and joined Malaysia Shipyard and Engineering as a NDT Technician.
On this new job, he started out by performing the NDT techniques of magnetic particle testing, penetrant testing and ultrasonic testing. It was in 2004 that he joined Brooke Dockyard Engineering, located in Kuching, Sarawak, as an NDT Inspector. During three years of service, he was promoted to the position of structural QC and piping inspector.
As a freelancer, Junaidi has worked with several companies in the petrochemical and pipeline industries, such as CTCI for Titan Petrochemical’s project in Pasir Gudang, where he was a mechanical and piping inspector, as well as a pipeline project at Tanjung Langsat plus some other projects in Penang and Kulim. He worked for PFCE for the major turnaround of Optima and Petronas Penapisan Malaysia’s revamp of the PSR 2 Refinery. Finally, in 2011, He decided to join TWI as a lecturer, marking a shift in his career path from being on site to becoming a full time lecturer.
“I consider working at TWI as my career achievement. Because TWI is a big and reputable company in the industry and, even before joining TWI, all my certificates were issued by TWI”, Junaidi said.
His long experience of working in structural quality control made Junaidi suitable for lecturing CSWIP Visual Welding Inspector and CSWIP Welding Inspector courses. Since then, he has had worked on various projects with wide scopes, making him a multidiscipline professional. This has been a major success factor in Junaidi’s teaching career as, when his students have questions about the problems they face on site, he has already been exposed to similar cases and can use his real life experience to help his students solve their problems and learn better.
Having worked as a lecturer at TWI for three years, Junaidi decided that he still needs to go back to the site and learn more from real life projects. He also wanted to establish his own engineering consultancy company which demanded more of his time.
As a result, he got involved with several projects - from Sabah Oil and Gas Terminal, Petronas, SAMU Plant to MLNG Train 9, Pengerang Terminal and Sarawak Energy pipeline. However, he stayed in contact with TWI as a freelance lecturer to keep his teaching skills intact and then finally, in 2019, he decided to fully move back to his teaching job at TWI.
“I enjoy working at TWI because of the great relationship that I have with my colleagues. We know each other well and we get along perfectly. I love teaching because I meet so many people from different industries and backgrounds. This also benefits me because of the connections I can build with my students,” Junaidi said.
Junaidi, who has been a permanent member of the Welding Inspector programme, was on the forefront of the transition to Online Live classes via Zoom, which was introduced in 2020. As he explained of his personal experience, in the beginning he was sceptical about the acceptance of candidates and the success of the programme. But, as time proved, this seems to be the new norm for training. He is also pleased that, along the way, he has developed a new skill for delivering training courses online, using the interactive tools and techniques to engage with candidates. He also believes that candidates should give this method of training a try as he finds the online live classes far more effective for the theoretical aspect of the training, since candidates can get more one-on-one time with the lecturer through video calls, chat and email communications. Moreover, the online classes are typically organised in the evenings, after working hours, which provides more flexibility to the working professionals.