Siapa dia TINA TAJUDDIN ? The Housewife who became CEO

The Housewife who became a CEO 

TAJ International College first started out in 1996 as TAJ College, a small college in small town Ipoh. Founded by a respected local leader who chose education to uplift the local population, the path of fate made a turn in 2005 and the daughter was given a chance to shine.

Tina bt Tajuddin was a young housewife when her big challenge came. She was actually nursing a four months old baby when her destiny called. There was also the small matter of location, she was happily married and living in Kuala Lumpur while the college was back in her hometown of Ipoh which was a few hundred kilometres away. To make it even more difficult, her young family’s modest economic situation at the time meant that she could not even afford to own a motor vehicle. In order to make it work, she would have to get on a long distance bus at 4am every morning to get to work on time, only to return back to her already asleep children late at night.

In true entrepreneurial fashion Tina surmounted her difficulties and emerged as a model SME Bank success story. Her intelligence, determination and business acumen transformed the modest college. She moved the college from a shoplot setting to a perfect location which allowed her to easily grow and add to the facilities of the college. From the college’s early days of conducting scaffolding pre-university programmes, various educational qualifications were added such as certificates, diplomas, degrees and Masters degrees.

Apart from home-grown programmes at the certificate and diploma levels specialising in automotive engineering, beauty management, early childhood education, and various business, management and entrepreneurship programmes, the college further extended its sphere into entrepreneurial university programmes at the degree and Masters level in partnership with leading universities such as UNITAR. Its latest foray is into healthcare education in collaboration with Cyberjaya University College of Medical Sciences (CUCMS).

SME Bank’s facilities to assist new entrepreneurs made great sense to Tina. With no commercial bank interested to even listen, it was SME Bank that assisted Tina to elevate her operations. In 2009 she received funding of RM4 million to upgrade her college building and facilities. In 2012 Tina obtained a series of funding totalling over RM4 million to meet her expansion plans.

Tina’s next goal is for her college to achieve the status of ‘University College’ by 2016. With her dynamism, ambition and quick thinking, we are sure she will be able to achieve this and more!