Making Life Easier with Connectivity – Making The Cut With Vivian Chua, HP

We speak to Vivian Chua, Singapore Managing Director, HP, on how HP is making lives easier for their customers by enhancing connectivity, as well as what she thinks is most important for young people to think about when starting their careers.

Q: Vivian, we are living in a very challenging environment right now with the Covid-19 pandemic all over the world. How do you navigate the challenges that we’re faced with right now, especially as a leader?

One of our initiatives, like HP Spirit, is what we actually launched to make sure that our employees are, in terms of their mind and physical wellness, taken care of by bringing people closer together, and at the same time, we’re also using a lot of technology to get them to upskill during this time because the government is also pushing for upskilling.

Internally we have things like Coursera, LinkedIn, a lot of self-paced programmes that the employees can leverage during this time to kind of get themselves equipped for the future and get themselves ready for the future.

Q: Speaking of tech, with the faster pace of the advancement of technology that we have today, and how one advancement leads to the next innovation and next innovation, do you think a recovery of any sort at this point will also be faster, once we get over this period?

I would say yes, right? But I think the more important part of this question is clearly, we need to understand what do we need to hasten and quicken the pace of recovery.

So HP is here every step of the way with the customer to make sure that we are there to help them adopt the right technology to help them do things like process automation, collaboration in a more secure mobile kind of environment to allow them to be able to quickly revive their business post-pandemic and in fact, faster than the market

Q: Since we’re talking about the future, for BMW for example, we’ve been partnering with them, uh, for a long time and the vision of the future for mobility is electric and autonomous. In fact, I’m very excited about autonomous cars because I like to be driven! But for HP, what is the future going to be like, in terms of PC and connectivity and all that?

Over time we have been also making life more simple for people to adopt right? For example BMW, they have a connected app whereby you can actually send your destination to the car, before you even step into the car right?

So HP has got a smart app, HP Smart App, that allows you to print from anywhere, and troubleshoot your printer from anywhere, any mobile device, and clearly, these are the innovations that are coming to make life simpler and easier.

Q: That’s a very important point that you pointed out, because a lot of the technology that we have today, a lot of the things we use today, even the car, a laptop, a PC or the printer, there’s a lot of intricate innovation going on inside, but how do you make that user experience simple in such a way that we don’t even know what’s happening, it’s just there, it just makes connecting easier?

In order to make things simpler, there’s a lot of connected work done to make sure that the customer can work on the laptop, print easily, print to anywhere and these are all innovations that we invest in, and hearing from the customer, that allows us to make that ecosystem ready for the customer to adopt.

And clearly, these are the edge that the continuous listening to the customer, the continuous insight that the customer gives us, allow us to make things as intuitive as possible for them.

Q: Now you love gadgets, I was told. I have my favourites, like my classics, right? How about you? Is there any one or two or three particular devices that you are fond of?

I think since young, I really loved to play with gadgets and my current love is this one. This is my current love, my little personalized HP Elite Dragonfly. This is what I use for work and I personalized it with a little sticker with my name, and it’s very easy to identify. It is actually built with recycled plastics as well, and it’s a convertible, it’s a two-in-one.

Q: You also love to fix stuff, I was told. Do you still do that now? I mean, now that you have everyone in HP at your call to fix things for you, is there still satisfaction in troubleshooting and fixing?

I do! I really love to fix things. At home, I’m not sure of many lady friends that you have but for me, I personally like to wire up my house or the Wi-Fi.

And I get great satisfaction, you know, at the end of it. Just like ta-da, it’s working!

Q: So you’ve been with HP for 21, how is it like staying with the same company for such a long period of time?

Okay, so for me, I think there are many people who tend to job hop around, in the anticipation of getting higher pay, better prospects.

For me, I think you can consider me as switching and job-hopping within the company. I think the job-hopping term doesn’t have a negative connotation, right?

It’s clearly understanding what you really want out of your career and whether the next job that you’re moving to is giving you that skill set that you’re missing and you want to develop, to allow you to have a long journey forward and that’s one aspect of it.

The other one is clearly the company that you’re working for, whether it does allow you that opportunity to grow and also have different opportunities for you to scale as well. I think these are the two key factors of moving within a company.

Q: One last thing, for a lot of young people out there who may be a little bit challenged in this confusing time really now, do you have any words of advice for the younger generation as they move into work life?

For younger people to really learn about, is have a personal brand. What do you want people to know you as? Even when you’re just starting out in a career, and over time, you need to ask yourself what’s the personal brand that you want to build?

Whether is it trustworthy, dependable, meticulous, I think these are some words that you can decide whether you want to label yourself with.

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This content was brought to you in partnership with BMW.