Jidapa Nitiwirakun, 21, Thailand (Skills for Jobs)

When Jidapa Nitiwirakun was around one year old, her mother noticed she wasn’t learning to walk. A doctor diagnosed her with muscular dystrophy.

At 21, she’s been able to land a job despite the limitations of living with the condition, including continuing to lose muscle strength each year. In September of last year, she joined the human resources department of Toyota Tsusho’s Thai headquarters, living independently and working remotely from her home in Pattaya, on Thailand’s coastal Chonburi province. The company is the trading arm of the Japanese automotive giant.

When she was growing up, Nitiwirakun said, “I had many dreams” – from owning a bakery to being a Thai-Japanese interpreter, since she was a fan of anime.

While at the Pattaya Redemptorist Technological College for People with Disabilities, she was part of Microsoft’s Skills for Jobs program, which teaches basic digital skills to those looking to get a job, a promotion or even a career change. She studied digital skills for business, from coding to PowerPoint to AI. She interned with Microsoft Thailand, which boosted her confidence as she was roped in to train employees as well as clients to use Power BI. “I was excited and nervous,” she said.

A visit from recruiters from Toyota Tsusho led to a full-time job as an administrative officer in their human resources department last year. She’s currently working on a project to track the company’s carbon footprint, using Power BI, and does the graphic design for internal communications. She uses Dall-E from OpenAI to generate images, saving time. She uses AI tools at work, to help with formulas for analytics on Power BI and to summarize information when searching on the web.

She continues to volunteer at her old college, “driving” her mechanized wheelchair back and forth from her apartment 10 minutes away.

Each month, she gives money to her father, mother and grandmother and helps to pay for her brother’s university fees. “I am very proud of myself that I can financially support my family,” she said.