RMG industry needs to develop homegrown leaders

In the early stage of the garment industry in Bangladesh, we had to seek expertise of foreign nationals. We had to appoint executives from Sri Lanka, India, China, Pakistan, Taiwan, and South Korea to develop products which we could not develop on our own due to a shortage of experts in this industry. There was a very small number of graduates per year from College of Textile Engineering & Technology (currently Bangladesh University of Textiles). In consequence, getting help from foreign experts was the obvious choice at that time. Though, over the time we started producing enough technical hands from textile educational institutes to meet our need.

These days our institutes are producing almost forty thousand textile graduates per year. Yet, some factories are still depending on foreign experts to develop specialized products and machines with modern technology. Realizing the lack of skilled manpower, many universities have already taken some initiatives by adding some subjects to their curriculum based on the garments industry such as Industrial Production Engineering, Merchandising, Fashion Technology, Lean Management, Apparel Manufacturing and Textile along with some diploma courses. To fulfill the need of leadership, we need to make sure that the graduates are getting adequate practical knowledge along with the academic knowledge.

Despite having our own experts, the tendency of hiring foreign experts has not disappeared from the industry. Recently several print and electronic media reports stated that Bangladesh has become the fourth largest remittance source for India. On top of that, many foreigners are living and working in Bangladesh illegally. It means they are not paying any income tax to our government which ultimately is harming our economy. Furthermore, their performance graph is the quite low compared to our graduates.

It is high time our very own people took the leadership of the garments industry rather than hiring top management from foreign experts. The graduates are enhancing their productivity knowledge and making them competitive with the concept of modern technology, fresh innovative ideas and usages of sophisticated machines to develop and design the specialized product. Now the garment sector is feeling necessity of their own people to lead the country’s garments industry beyond the utmost level to overcome all the barrier of the industry.

As our people are doing great and becoming expert in the RMG sector of Bangladesh, it is time to replace foreign expert from this sector by giving opportunity to our expert to develop our human resource so that all the arena of this sector would be able to sustain the productivity as well as human capital. If the owners of the garments industry appoint top management from the foreign nationals, the top management could not sustain long time in that factory. For instance, the factory and organization could not sustain the productivity. After getting the appointment as a part of top management, foreign expert tries to dominate our native people who works in the organization with foreign expert’s supervision.

Very often, it has been seen that foreign management could not sustain themselves in any organization in the long run. If a ready-made leader doesn’t match the culture of the factory, the whole factory suffers as he is on top of most of the workers and staffs. Besides, our management also gets in vulnerable situation. Foreign leaders try to shape the organization in their own way which might be different to our management’s view. This creates conflicts among the management.

Not to mention that hiring foreign employee in the garment sector is very much expensive through which a portion of remittance has been going to other country. As a result, outward remittance is increasing which is very much related to devaluation of our money.

It has been seen in this industry that the efficiency of the factories with foreign nationals’ involvement is not so good in comparison with the factories with our own experts. Besides this, foreign experts are getting way more benefits than our own experts. If the industry can give more emphasis to our own expert than foreign counterparts, it would be vice versa where our expert would get more benefit than foreign expert which would be significant towards the sustainability and the productivity of this industry.

To overcome this barrier, it is high time we gave the leadership to our own human resource by hiring Management Trainee Officer from the fresh graduates. As they are well educated, they are very much able to come out as top leaders by learning from the beginning. It is easier for them to cope with the factory culture. We can make them capable to lead our industry by making them go through all the stages of garments. In this way, they will be able to explore their capability which will help them to become leadership material.

The writer is Managing Director Snowtex Group