Most people who reach the top of a technical field stop collecting credentials. There is nothing left to prove, and the letters after the name already fill a business card. That makes the man behind Bulabog Malasakit an unusual case — because after three decades commissioning some of the Middle East’s most demanding construction projects, he is still, at this moment, enrolled as a student.
Engr. Francisco “Jhun” M. Lachica Jr. is the Associate Director for Middle East and Asia Pacific at Sutton Commissioning & Management Consultancy, a role that puts him at the center of delivering major construction and mission-critical projects across the region. Born in Bataan, he has spent more than 30 years working through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, Vietnam and beyond — the kind of career that usually reads as a finish line rather than a starting point.
The specialist’s specialist
Commissioning is the unglamorous, high-stakes discipline of proving that a finished building actually works — that the systems fire, the redundancies hold, the mission-critical rooms stay online. It is where projects are won or quietly lost. Jhun is recognized as the first Filipino to reach Grade 6 as a Commissioning Specialist in the United Kingdom, a distinction he carries into his work as a founding and committee member of the Commissioning Specialist Association in the GCC. Within the association’s Middle East chapter, he is, by his account, the only Filipino appointed to the committee.
For a profession that rarely makes headlines, it is a rare kind of visibility — a Filipino name on the technical bodies that set the standards others follow.
A student who never graduated from being one
Here is where the story turns. Rather than treating expertise as a destination, the Bataan-born engineer treats it as raw material for the next degree. His electrical engineering training was followed by a business administration degree in human resource development, then master’s work in engineering, business, and public administration. Today he is a PhD candidate in Public Administration at the University of Batangas and, simultaneously, a Doctor of Management candidate at the University of Saint Louis Tuguegarao.
The pattern says something about how he defines success: not as arrival, but as the refusal to stop learning. It is a philosophy he extends to people, too — as a certified trainer’s trainer and a former Employee of the Year, he has built a second reputation around developing others.
Success is only real when it’s shared
That instinct to give runs deepest in his charitable work. As founder and founding chairperson of Bulabog Malasakit, Jhun channels his energy into grassroots welfare for Filipino families and children in need, under a principle he calls “Compassion in Action.” The idea is simple and unfashionable: an accomplishment matters more once it belongs to someone else, too.
At home, the foundation is family. He is the proud father of two sons — Elmo, 26, a computer engineer, and Bart, 22, a recent AB Communication graduate. For all the titles and committees, it is the ordinary role of father that he places at the base of everything else.
From Bataan to the technical committees of the Gulf, his path makes an argument that needs no embellishment — that a Filipino professional can compete anywhere, and still measure the journey by who he brought along.
