Future looks bright in Myanmar as jobs platform Work gets 600,000 monthly pageviews

(Update: Earlier version of article attributed all statements to Karolin Hewelt. That’s now changed to Work.com.mm country manager Jort Statema)

Southeast Asia is full of promising markets, ready to be tapped by the right players at the right time. For Myanmar, the country which just started to open up to the world in 2011, the right time for internet companies to take full advantage of the new ecosystem is perhaps tomorrow. But Rocket Internet has been taking first-mover advantage since 2012.

Jort Statema from the jobs portal Work.com.mm – one of the sites under a joint venture between Rocket and telco Ooredo – told us some of the challenges they face when venturing into Myanmar’s online space.

Operating since June 2012, the 12-man team at Work pursued various online and offline initiatives to educate the market and get companies and regular people on board the job search service. The site has 50,000 registered job seeker profiles and 4,000 company profiles, recording 90,000 visits per month and 600,000 monthly pageviews. Each month the platform sees 2,000 new job posts, with 80,000 job applications in total completed within the site.

See: 4 things you must know when building a tech startup in Myanmar

Myanmar’s tech scene looking good

Myanmar’s internet penetration is still quite low, about four million users (about seven percent of the population) today. But given that this country just received unrestricted internet access in 2011, that number is good. In fact, Statema says that the country’s internet penetration can potentially grow as much as 50 percent in 2015. So they are more than ready to ride the internet’s rapid growth moving forward.

Some offline initiatives that Work pay attention to when building a tech company in Myanmar include advertisements in internet cafes and attending job fairs. “We also regularly invite jobseekers to our office to show how our website works and assist in uploading their CV to the site”, says Statema.

Besides the low internet penetration, the team also finds other challenges in Myanmar. “The biggest challenges are educational and cultural,” Statema adds:

Only a small percentage of the government budget is allocated to education, which results in a generally poor level of education. The standard of English is often low and we see that there’s no real culture of applying to jobs like there is in many other parts of the world. Many people are not familiar with a basic layout of a CV or don’t know how to prepare for a job interview.

See: What I learned setting up a startup incubator in Myanmar – and what you need to know about the country itself

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